The Ultimate Chair

bt445 pointed us to the desk of the future (well, kinda: we mentioned it here a couple years ago, but it's looking much nicer now. Mobile chair, multi head monitors, customized air flow: it would seem a shame to write code with this bad boy: it really looks like you should use it to drive a mech.

Comments

Techie chair

[lga]

I would love one of these. Shame about the prices though. Does anyone know a UK supplier? Steve.

Yuck, why don't you just become a cyborg

[Hairy_Potter]

I mean really, this setup looks like a recipe for obesity and muscle loss, sitting in an overly cushy chair with all your electronics within easy reach.

A few years of this and your muscles will atrophy.

The human body wasn't designed for sitting nearly motionless for such long periods of time, if you try to make it do do, you're going to get back aches, arthritis, obsesity, CPI and a host of other muscular-skeletal malfunctions.

Something better would be something like the running pad for the old school nintendos, where you can move your whole body around to use your computer. Step with your right foot for carraite return, left foot for back in your browser, etc, etc, etc. A few eyars of this, and geeks would have the body of Adonis.

Re:Yuck, why don't you just become a cyborg

[King of the World]

> I mean really, this setup looks like
> a recipe for obesity and muscle loss,

That's the same line of thought as "make Linux more user-friendly and you'll take away it's power".

Nuts to that.

This is a more comfortable and pleasant environment (well, lets assume that) it doesn't mean you're going to be a arthritic zombie. It merely assists you to do what you do. If you're an idiot that wallows in a fancy chair then heaven forbid if you ever got loose in a beer factory.

Chairs don't kill people - people kill people.

Re:Yuck, why don't you just become a cyborg

[chuckfirment]

"The human body wasn't designed for sitting nearly motionless for such long periods of time..." Heck, the human body wasn't designed to EVER work at a computer! A few years of working at any computer and your muscles will atrophy UNLESS you take precautions. Get up and stretch once in a while, walk away from the keyboard and **do not spend your life in front of your monitor.** No matter how comfortable you are in front of your computer you still need to walk away from it once in a while. Anything else is unhealthy. Chuck "I think I'll go for a walk" Firment

Re:Yuck, why don't you just become a cyborg

[American AC in Paris]

Something better would be something like the running pad for the old school nintendos, where you can move your whole body around to use your computer. Step with your right foot for carraite return, left foot for back in your browser, etc, etc, etc. A few eyars of this, and geeks would have the body of Adonis.

Heh. Imagine the poor schmuck surfing porn at work with one of those things. They'd be doing a tarantella just trying to close the pop-up windows when the boss walked into the office...

Re:Yuck, why don't you just become a cyborg

[Glytch]

The human body was "designed" for anything. We evolved.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a variation on Godwin's Law for debates about human origins...

Re:Yuck, why don't you just become a cyborg

[Christopher Bibbs]

The human body wasn't designed for sitting nearly motionless for such long periods of time

Uh... the human body wasn't designed for anything. In fact, it wasn't designed at all. We evolved to this state and we'll continue to evolve. If this chair weeds out those genes that require people to be active 3 hours a day in order not to develope disease, so be it.

Chair of the future?

[Xafloc]

More like chair of your dreams. Come on...who here is going to spend more on their chair, than they are on their computer. Maybe it is just me, but I am going to buy bigger/badder/better computer hardware/equipment long before I buy a cool looking "chair" or "desk".

Besides that, who here as room for this thing in their apartment or house? I mean, it has it's own air control system. Just slap some sides on this puppy and sell it as a portable room.


-= Xafloc =- Xafloc.com
Nod.toM

Re:Chair of the future?

[bmongar]

If more companies would spend good money on chairs maybe they would have less workmans comp, maybe insurance premiums would be lower. My back hurts so much I can't sit for an hour anymore, I think it is due to these cheap chairs that many companies stick programmers in.

There is a store with cool chairs but once again cost is very high, but what is the real cost of not buying good chairs

Re:Chair of the future?

[BinxBolling]

More like chair of your dreams. Come on...who here is going to spend more on their chair, than they are on their computer. Maybe it is just me, but I am going to buy bigger/badder/better computer hardware/equipment long before I buy a cool looking "chair" or "desk".

The chair I'm sitting in is a Herman Miller Aeron, which costs around $800, retail. I figure my company probably paid $500-$600 for it, since they bought a large number of them. That's less than 1% of my annual salary.

If being more comfortable (and this chair is far more comfortable than any other work chair I've ever had) makes people 1% more productive than a less comfortable chair, the company is actually making money by buying the more expensive chairs.

I'm in the process of turning one room of my apartment into an office where I can work from home, occasionally. I'm probably going to go ahead and shell out the money for an Aeron. If not the Aeron, then some other high-quality chair.

That said: The super-cube in this article doesn't look particularly comfortable to me. Give me a real office, with a door that closes, not some gimmicky-looking piece of trash.

The world's most comfortable chair?

[jfunk]

Ah, I'm so happy. I can't think of anything one might want to do other than just sit in this chair. All of my worries have just melted away.

50 years later...

Apologies to the Tick...

American made?

[Lion-O]

I allways disliked the idea of working inside a small cube (most recent example seen in The Matrix ;)) and this doesn't make things any better. Granted; it looks like you can easily work with the computer. But stuff like checking manuals, writing documents and still then trying to keep the Unix bible from crashing off your table seems like nearly impossible there. A small desk for papers and such before they keyboard and a somewhat larger one behind your back?

Dunno about you guys but when I grab the FM I'd like to check those examples and thingies while I'm reading (at least at work). IMHO this design sucks for system administrators (that would be me ;)), programmers, site art designers, financial managers (don't know the right verb), application managers, and maybe even directors / managers themselves (there is hardly any space to talk with customers). So whats left? IMHO the ordinary secretaries and the people behind the desk, but I doubt if they would like a design such as this ;)

IMHO people should concentrate on how you can use this kind of stuff. NOT how it looks.

Possibilities...

[American AC in Paris]

Think of the fun you could have with a soldering iron, a new motor and a few hours alone with your co-worker's brand-new Aura desk. Take the time it reqires to rotate the desk 120 degrees down from 15 seconds to, say, .25 seconds...

"...hey, Bob, got a minute?"

"...why sure, Jim! Let me just...turn my desk around...(Bob reaches conspicuously for control unit; other co-workers groan, roll eyes)

*click* WHZZZZT! *CRASH* "AIEEEEeeeee....."

Do they actually have customers?

[Black Perl]

What I'd like to know is, do they actually have customers? Companies that are filling space with these instead of cubicles? I'd like to hear from someone whose company is springing for these, if such a person exists.

Ergonomic information

[pemerson]

For those of you who are interested in being as ergonomically correct as possible, you might want to check out the Typing Injury FAQ Home Page.
There's information there about furniture, keyboards, mice, etc., as well reasons why you want an ergonomically correct environment

My department just got the Aeron Chair from Herman Miller, and they are not only very comfortable, but easy to configure and reconfigure, so that you don't keep the same posture throughout the day. I highly recommend them, although they run about $750 per chair.

I'm not impressed...

[KlausBreuer]

What? Me, the ultimate technophile, not impressed by smooth curves, individual lightning and A/C?

That's because I think this is simply the deluxe-version of the stupid little computer-tables we find in the corner of computershops.
You know, the ones where you have your PC, Printer, Keyboard, Paper and Mouse jammed into a tiny little space without any real desktop space at all.

I find this rather important: you cannot have enough desktop space. It's cute if you can rotate your workarea to follow (avoid?) the sun, but where do I place my books, papers, notes, disks, CDs, magazines, lunch?

I'm currently designing The Ultimate PC Desk with a good friend (a carpenter in Germany), and the main thing so far is to have a truly massive workspace (yes, when it's done we'll put up a site and I'll tell you all about it).

Thinking of these Poetic Technology (hey, nice name) desks, I imagine a huge, open room, full of these things, with people sitting edge to edge to edge to edge...worse than cubicles, ugh.

Klaus
---
"What, I need a *reason* for everything?" -- Calvin

Worst than cubicles...

[JPS]

Hum, hopefully this is going to be expensive, else I can only imagine how work would be like, when your "office" will be reduced to the size of one of these things.

- "Err.. Where is my office?"

- "But this IS your office, you have everything you need inside. We are actually waiting for the new model, which features a body excrements removal system, walls and a sas lockable from outside. Have fun!"

Re: Become a cyborg

[kb1cvh]

A couple of suggestions to avoid health problems: 1) hookups to electronic muscle stimulator to prevent muscle atrophy. 2) hookups to human waste disposal system to transport liquid and solid waste away for treatment/disposal Virtual 8 of 9 ;-)

Re:Slashdot repeats story for 100th time!

[Rendus]

And I quote, from the story as it appeared:

bt445 pointed us to the desk of the future (well, kinda: we mentioned it here a couple years ago, but it's looking much nicer now.

They:

1) Admit it's a repeat.
2) Mention it's looking much nicer now.
3) Posted a story that was <B>SUBMITTED BY A READER!</B>

What don't you people understand about this? Almost ALL slashdot stories are submitted by people who read Slashdot. At least one person found this interesting, Slashdot worthy, and didn't know it had been posted.

Re:WOW! What news!

[signe]

And you read my fscking comment before you start bitching. Taco mentions that it was posted a couple years ago. One of those /. articles that I linked is about 7 months old, and the other is less than 2. And I looked at the site on both occassions, and it was the same design.

Now granted, I can't even get to the poetictech site to see if it's a "new" design, but I doubt it. Somehow I think it's the same one we saw before.

-Todd

---

The Kungfu typewriter

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

Artificial-reality pioneer Myron Krueger hinted to a "Kung-fu typewriter": You stand in an augmented environment. You type by throwing kicks and punchs to virtual or artificial keys.
It may not be very productive, but, if you currently spend 8 hours typing and 2 exercising to compensate the sedentary time, with this you could spend 10 hours kungfu-typing.

Great, this Krueger.
__

Re:The Kungfu typewriter

[djan]

So if this kind of typewriter gets to be a success, the next hit song will be "Kung-Fu Typin'"

"Everybody's kung-fu typin'
Those cats type a doc like lightnin'
It makes doin' emacs look frightnin'
when everybody's kung-fu typin'

gun rack?

[lophophore]

There's no gun rack, and no draught unit. This is not the ultimate chair.

there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count

Ultimate Desk ... office prison

[MarkHardie]

Gee, take a cubicle and make it more constricting, claustrophobic(sp?), and unsightly. The desk of the future is not a desk, probably not indoors, and completely lacking in circa 1980s computer peripherals scattered about. What people should be thinking about is the "Ultimate Productivity Environment" of the future for communication-intensive tasks, or creative tasks, or personal learning experiences. m.hardie

VideoDesk

[Anonymous Coward]

If you like big monitors, you should go for the VideoDesk project of Myron Krueger. It was a desk with a projector and a camera above. It could recognize gestures. So you dragged a virtual (or a real object) and dropped it on another, all with your two 5-fingered hands.

An ideal version could OCR any page you put on the desk. You cut and paste text pointing at it and dragging it to a blank real paper page.

I find it fascinating.

A couple of unimportant thoughts...

[alumshubby]

...is that up to four 21" monitors it'll accommodate? And what kind of shelf/counter space does that leave?If I used something like this, I'd probably also pay to have a carpenter build a clamshell around it like Darth Vader had in The Empire Strikes Back. I'd go in there, lower the access, and it's "I'm Busy, Nobody Bother Me" time. Plus with some kind of wraparound wall, there could be a LOT more task-surface area and storage space for books, etc.Now if I can just find a technical writing job at $80 an hour...

dilbert Cubical 2000

[Barbarian]

Remember the Dilbert Cartoon, where he had the new Cubicle 3000 (or something like that)....

"Whatever you do, don't get these two tubes mixed up..."

--