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Pro-Active Furniture Assembly
Gudlyf writes "Stavros Antifakos, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has designed "clever" furniture pieces with built-in microprocessors that could relieve the confusion, anger and frustration of putting them together. The idea includes a flat-pack furniture kit whose parts are fitted with cheap microprocessors that monitor what you are doing during assembly and will warn you if you are doing something wrong or dangerous."
This sounds like a pain in the ass to me. But that's me.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Just my 2 cents
Maybe I'm getting crochety in my old age, but does this seem like a monumental waste of time/technology? Hell, how difficult is furniture to put together anyway? This sounds a lot like the blinking "12:00" thing. Why not just make improvements to the design itself so it's not so complex to put together. Are we talking about putting together space shuttle command chairs here or something? I assume the next version will have blue tooth and will send you pictures of the proper installation as well as play mp3's. It will obviously have to have a change detector for the couch version that automatically updates a website with the current total, as well as a volume/mass summary of lint and crumbs.
The cost of bookshelves will go up because people can't (or won't) RTFM.
Am I the only one who sees a certain irony in this?
In any case, you can't make anything foolproof - as soon as you do, someone breeds a dumber fool.
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
... is for swingsets and bicycles and all of that other "some assembly required" crap with miserably translated confusing manuals. Think of all of the heartache it would save on Christmas Eve!!!
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
I wonder if it they sell a slightly beligerant(sp?) model?
"Yeah, I guess that goes there. IF YOU WANT TO BUILD IT WRONG! My god, you're dumber than the screwdriver you're currently holding wrong. I think I just saw the special olympics run by outside, go grab one of those kids and have him do it. And for the last friggin time THEIR ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SCREWS LEFT OVER. Quit thinking I threw extras in the back, dumbass."
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
How long before we see the /. article about someone getting the Linux kernel to boot in his futon?
Okay, so cheap unassembled pulpwood laminated in plastic is overpriced. But wait, it has microprocessors embedded to help you assemble it.
Is that all? Not on your life!
Don't write that check just yet. We'll include a free set of batteries for all twelve embedded processors.
NOW how much would you over-pay?
If you call in the next five minutes, we'll even throw in a piezo speaker which will tell you in five languages just how stupid you are when you try to assemble the bookshelf backwards!
<sing>Come on down to Psuedo-Dane, where you know the Prices are Insane!</sing>
[
Will they just stay on until the batteries die if light continues to hit the sensors? Will the couch cry if a fat man sits on it and breaks it?
This has, of course, already been prefigured in sci fi; someone at that company has been reading Bruce Sterling.
- undoware.ca
What about chairs that scream alerts when we've been sitting in them for too long?
...etc, etc. =P
"GO OUT AND DO SOMETHING USEFUL INSTEAD OF SITTING IN AND READING SLASHDOT!"
"HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF A 300 POUND GUY SAT ON YOU ALL DAY."
In my experiance with this cheap easily assembled furnature, the biggest problem is the instruction manual. Usually it's some horrible job done at the last minute, then translated into English by somebody's kid who's just finished English 101. Often times the instructions are just plain wrong (presumably due to design changes made to the piece after the manual was written). Fortunatly, almost all of this furnature has the same basic instructions:
1. put all of the little lockbolt things in the little holes.
2. Put all of the big cam things into the big holes
3. Stick all of the parts together and twist the cams until they stop.
It's not rocket science, but I'd still like a manual that was at least partially understandable.
I read the internet for the articles.
This sounds an awful lot like the building materials that told people (vocally, not via screen) how to assemble them into a building from Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction. Don't need skilled labor if the bricks tell you what to do. Very interesting to see this in the real world.
mahlen
I defend myself by saying that, although this seemed immoral to me, it also seemed as though it wouldn't ever work anyway. --Fred Pohl, "The Coming of the Quantum Cats", ca. 1985
Relieve the confusion, anger, and frustration?
"Now now... I know this is hard... you're going through a tough time, I know. Just close your eyes and count till 10... ok? Now take a deep breath and this time hit the nail with the hammer, not your thumb. You're doing a good job!"
with the missus giving helpful advice. Now I have to listen to the actual piece of furniture I'm assembiling?
>
The system can suggest the next most appropriate action at any point in time
Couch: It looks like you smacked your thumb with a hammer. Would you like to:
1)Swear in your native language?
2)Kick something?
3)Dial a friend to come over and laugh at you?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Me: "Insert tab A into slot C..."
Bookshelf 2000: "I'm sorry Dave, but I can't let you do that" BZZZZZAAPPP!
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I fondly remember the first apartment my wife and I occupied. We needed furnishings in quantity, and were pretty broke, so we did the usual thing for our neck of the woods: we head out to Ikea and snagged as much cheap stuff as we good.
We discovered an interesting thing that evening: the more difficult to assemble pieces usually have the more gutteral names. Which is convenient, because when you're screaming it in frustration, it's more satisfying. For example, when I torqued my hand on a hex wrench trying to assemble a "sverker" shelving unit, I spent a good minute and a half shouting, "Goddamn sverking sverk of a sverker!"
With this technology, I don't really expect this phenomenon to go away:
Me: Okay, lemmee see here. Almost got it...
(Electronic Female Swede): Warning. You are now applying excessive pressure to the hex wrench. Bodily injuy may result if cont...
Me: OWW! Sverking son of a sverk!
EFS: Hey, I warned you, asshole.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
One application was building construction- grab a bunch of appropriate materials, attach a CPU to each piece, and they'll begin to network together and exchange blueprints. The human builders who fit things together can be completely unskilled, because everytime someone picks up a piece, it transmits instructions to his headset telling him where it needs to be stuck in relation to all the other chunks.
This story seems to be the same idea, but on a smaller and non-self-organizing scale.
Wow! Imagine a Sauder cluster of these!
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Here I am waiting for hydrogen cars and holodecks, what I get are talking furniture parts. Screw you guys.
after all, they make all that stylish-but-cheap pine furniture that you have to put together once you return home from Ikea.
I either praise those clever Swedish designers or curse them as dirty little reindeer eaters.
Instead of inflating the price of the products, how about the companies spend that excess money on making the product easier to assemble?
Most of the time, its just improving the instruction manual. Instead of hiring a tech company to put all this technology in, how about you just hire a few good writers to make a nice and easy to understand manual?
Sheesh
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
How about a little easter egg built, so whenever 260lbs of weight are applied, the chair says "hey lardass, time to take a diet - you're killin' my joints here."
Of course, this would never go through, but there are other interesting possibilities with weight-sensors and perhaps people on diets...
"HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN."
"Uhh...fine?"
"ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US."
"Lesse...um...base...base...Ah! Here it is. OK, do I attach the Main Column (E) to the Base (A)?"
"YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DOING."
"Great...OK...now I put the Main Screen (F) here...and the Zigs (M) go...here?"
"MOVE ZIG."
"Oh...here?"
"MOVE ZIG."
"Umm...er...here?"
"TAKE OFF EVERY ZIG."
"No, wait! It goes here, right? Or here?"
"SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB."
"Oh, c'mon, It's not that screwed up. Just lemme get my drill...and a hot glue gun..."
"HA HA HA HA."
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
... but doesn't it strike you as a wee bit unsettling if furniture is designed so that mis-assembly can be "dangerous" in the first place??!
I can hear it now: "Dave, if you don't screw my leg in correctly, I'm going to come loose and stab you up the arse!"
[Dave grabs chainsaw and applies it smartly to the chair]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If anything, wouldn't the Swedes, who brought us Ikea, have come up with this?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I'd like pieces that have easily removable sticks on them that say "up", "down", "left", "right" instead of "A". I've not once put together a piece of furniture where I didn't put something backwards in the first 3 steps, only to realize it on the last step.
You're making it much too complicated. All you need to know is that the square pegs go into the square holes!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Surely this isn't really being funded by Switzerland, it must be Sweden. After all, modular furniture is their major export, isn't it?
If you can't figure out how to assemble IKEA furniture, I mean.... ugh! You should not have made it to adulthood, you should clearly have already died in some horrific Lego set assembly accident as a youth.
Idiots of the world: Here's a plan. If you're too fucking dumb to insert Tab A into Slot B yourself, then YOU hire someone to do it, and YOU incur the extra cost. Don't complain until they have to start making furniture that coaxes you through assembling it, thus jacking the price up for everyone including the intelligent people like me who can and will read and follow instructions.
This is further evidence that all that time I spent in search of knowledge in my younger days was wasted. I should have just spent it drinking beer, eating pork rinds, watching pro wrestling, NASCAR, and tractor pulls on TV like everyone else, and waiting for society to mold itself to my needs as a complete buffoon.
Hmm... maybe I can fix things myself....
/me looks around for a crayon and a mallet.
~Philly
Come on. Furniture that comes flat-packed is almost always so easy to install the instructions rarely even contain WORDS, just pictures. How much work are these microprocessors going to save me if the full installation instructuions consist of 4 or 5 pictures, and the only tool I need is a hex-driver ?
Sounds useless in its current incarnation, but imagine this:
Customer to furniture: "I need the TV section 3 inceh wider"
Furniture: "You will need a 3/16" drill bit, and a measuring tape to complete the modofication"
Instructions follow....
Or... as is(at least used to be) so common, you are missing some bit that is essential to contruction. You can point to the missing piece on some pressure sensitive photo of parts, and the computer will automatically call-up the store and order the missing bits for you. You don't have to try explaining what you need to a person "The long brown screw with the stop sign hole at the top. It's a little longer than the door handle on the glass and shorter than the crosspiece at the shelf support"
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
- A router built into a computer desk.
- An armchair with wireless IR/802.11 links for wireless digital headphones.
- Lamps with an IP address for a remote dimming/lighting service. (Discussed previously on
/.)
Any other ideas anyone? Anyone?"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
before the marketing department realizes that they can sell AD space on the things... Just think...
"While you are assembling subassembly B.... wouldn't this be more fun with a Pepsi? Or better yet Dominoes Pizza is great during furniture assembly"
or
"Warning: the structure is unstable this way... Band-Aid brand medical bandages will help protect those wounds"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sure, the furniture will talk to me when I forgot to insert "tab a" into "slot b", but will it scream in agony after I smash my thumb with a hammer?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
.
This is a classic (or soon to be) example of abuse of technology.
Of all of the means available for 'instruction' for assembly available
(12 language pidgen printed manuals, unpictable pictograms, VHS tapes,
CDROMs, Online webpages, 8/900# telephone help lines, and pdf versions),
this one makes my skin crawl.
Now if they could apply it to refolding a roadmap, maybe I could tolerate it.
One more backseat driver, in the car probably wouldn't phase me.
.
If someone is too damn dumb to assemble a piece of prefab furniture, I want them to do something dangerous and get the hell out of the gene pool. I mean, really, we as a society are making it WAAAY too easy to be a moron...
Murphy was an optimist.
New wooden dowel insert detected, please reboot night table for changes to take affect.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
"There is already a natural occurance of this type of warning. It's called pain."
I don't want my furniture feeling pain. Pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to revenge. Next thing you know my toilet decides to take scuplting lessons when I bring a girl over.
...for stupid people.
If they'd just put more labels on the tabs, or color-code them it'd be far more effective. So, where do the batteries go? Besides, who wants to pay for extra electronic components that are only going to be used once? I bet this would raise the price of furniture at least $10. This sounds like another over-application of technology for technology's sake. Nice try, but this looks like another research project not thinking about practicality.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Anyways, there is a scene in the game where Torin must cross a slippery, grassy area. And the grass talks to you while you move your cursor to select where Torin should jump. When it's in the wrong spot, shrill, high-pitched, annoyingly LOUD voices shriek at you saying:
"Nope! Not Here! No Way! Nope! Unh-uh"
If I had to hear that while trying to assemble a computer desk or an entertainment center or something, I'd probably use the tools included to stab out my ear drums.
Hmm...only trouble I see with Ikea, in browsing their site, is you have to spend quite a bit to get an item that's not either (a) made of wicker, or (b) apparently designed by someone under the influence of LSD. Do people actually buy giant day-glo-orange barrels with seat-shaped depressions in them to sit on in their living rooms? ;-)
;)
Most of my furniture is secondhand (for the big items), or Wal-Mart flatpack (for shelves, tables, and the like). All of the flatpack stuff was pretty easy to put together. It's not all that pretty, but I prefer function over form anyway, and at least it doesn't look like a reject from a Picasso painting.
DennyK
Why is this classed as science? It's not science. It's technology.
- compact to ship, and
- easy to assemble.
Having some sort of assembly assistance could relax the latter requirement and enable more complicated DIY products. Or they could be used for faster training of assembly-line workers. If I get any more ideas, I may have to start charging consulting fees.On to my subject: There's a 116 MB video on their site. I downloaded the whole thing at work (way fast) and watched it (about 5 minutes or so). It's pretty deadpan, and shows a guy putting together an Ikea Pax armoire unit. (It just so happens that I have three of these myself. They're pretty straight-forward to assemble, just quite heavy at 50 kilos per unit, not including doors or shelves.) There's also footage of the developer discussing how his ideas work, with some overlays of accelerometer output and the like. The clip ends with the builder standing proudly next to the completed armoire, as the image fades to black. After a short pause, there is a loud crash, so I think these guys had a sense of humor about their project.
Or use computers, for that matter. As far as I can tell, this thing was designed to help dumb people build things that are too complex for them to build in the first place.
I recently bought a large and complex second-hand desk that was unassembled. I deduced how it goes together, and I assembled it myself. Two parts were missing. I contacted the manufacturer, who was kind enough to ship them to me free of charge all the way from Quebec. The even shipped me a manual so I could verify how it goes together.
All this new technology will do is further confuse the dumb people, and insult the intelligence of people who know how figure it out. After 4 years with a computer, my boss still asks me how to save attachments in her outlook express, or how to scan and save documents. Things like computer interfaces or "Peg A goes into slot B" technologies have reached the limit of simplification. There is some technology that can't (and shouldn't) be made simpler. The only thing my boss (and dumb people trying to assemble things) would benefit more from is if someone did the work for them.
The money and effort spent on this new technology would be better served if the company started shipping pre-built furniture.
Wrigley announced they are putting microchips in sticks of gum to warn if you are doing something dangerous, like walking.
I've only put together 4 items from Ikea, but I did not encounter any instances of breakage or incompleteness. I also purchased a couch from them (pre-assembled) that is structurally sound. It's possible Ikea's shortcomings are not consistent, and you were simply the victim of a freak occurence. I don't know if that makes you feel better or not, though.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You know Marvin, the paranoid android, from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? What would happen if they used his "personality"?
"It's no use checking all the bits are there before you start, because you're bound to lose some, everybody does."
"You need to tighten it harder. You need to tighten it harder." (SNAP!) "I knew that was going to happen, it always does".
"Brain the size of a planet, and what do they get me to do? Make sure this moron that can barely string a sentence together can screw this table together. I ask you! Brain the size of a planet!"
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
The good news is, your furniture is now programmed to tell you how to build it.
The problem is, you have one of three options.
1) Listen to the instructions in Japanese
2) Listen to very broken English mushmouthed by a Swede "Fronken A, B tab slot do in be putting. Shmicken C Swivel Trocker B connect do be."
3) Destroying the microprocessors with a very large ball peen hammer.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! (Ie. My Living Room!)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Why does the idea of "microprocessors" sound like overkill in this sense?
Couldn't a few transistors and some LEDs serve the same purpose at a tiny fraction of the cost?
Or couldn't furniture companies hire more proficent people to write and translate assembley instructions, draw understandable diagrams, or number/color-code parts. Quite low-tech, but also quite efficent and useful...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I've met people who should not own a hammer, who use one anway. They manage to get their pictures hung, but anyone who knows how to use a hammer laughs at the attempt. This is for something simple. They should not put furnature togather, they should buy it assembled.
Note that these people are not stupid, just they have no mechanical skills. Several have honestly (well, as honest as lawyers can be anyway) earned several million dollars.
If you can't handle mechanical things, no problem. There are plenty of people who can be hired to do that for you. I can't do a very good job of cutting hair, but I hire that done. Nor am I a very good lawyer, doctor, writer, dog trainer. No problem, I recignise my limits, and choose what I do. I could be some of the above, but I can't learn all of the above, so I hire experts. (In fact I have hired, or plan to hire all of the above mentioned experts)
Unimaginative computer geeks!
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
warn you if you are doing something ... dangerous
"Please stop. It is not safe to throw this kit out the window, as it may hit someone below."
Here's a thought: How 'bout suplementing the hard copy with animated instructions showing how the pieces fit, either on a website, or on a CD or even DVD included in the package? (For cost purposes, though, a flash movie on the website might be best). Understood that you're making some basic assumptions about the technical savvy of your customer (has and uses DVD/PC) but it might still have *some* utility.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Nice to see that *someone* got the joke...
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.