A Pattern That Always Fits But Never Repeats

By Lisa Agustin

Computer-scientist-turned-designer Asao Tokolo has developed Tokolo Pattern Magnets, which allow you to interlock the tiles to create a non-repeating pattern that still manages to match the edges of a single tile to its adjoining one. The magnets’ pattern is based on the karakusa, or the Japanese version of the arabesque, which made its way to Japan twelve hundred years ago via the Spice Route. According to the New York Times:

Scholarly papers have been dedicated to the ingenious ways these patterns can be generated and made to interlock and repeat — the fractal geometries of form. What interested Tokolo, though, was the way each tile could have a completely unique shape, and yet be made to link harmoniously to all the others — an unexpected harmony, perhaps, between Western individualism and Eastern collectivism.