Magic Benches are a series of urban furniture to be placed in populous public and private spaces. The first bench in this series is actually a stool It is called a “free advice stool.”

The free advice stool is a stool kept at different places with statements like

“Do you need some free advice? Sit on this chair”

and

“Do you like to give free advice? Someone is waiting here”

put up around it.

Objectives of putting stools like this around:

• a pun about the eagerness with which most of us in India offer unsolicited advice to others
• a platform for seeking random and neutral advice between strangers

The first such stool I am putting up in the Cafeteria of my school (Srishti). This is what it looks like:

It is made of card-board but is very strong. It has been stress-tested by me! I chose the “free advice stool” to be made of this material because

• I wanted to use something which came out of nowhere, a bench which is made either with cheap, waste and recyclable material. This way it can also go back into the nowhere it came out of.
• I wanted the stool to reflect the insecurity / vulnerability of the state of mind in which one is when one is asking for advice. So, before one sits on the stool, one wonders if one will fall. If the stool is strong enough to take one’s weight.

It was designed by Bharat Joshi and made by Bharat Joshi and Avinash Deshmukh.