Today I was talking to a undergrad who is disillusioned with what he’s studying in industrial design studio.  While we were talking, I was reminded of something Papanek wrote that helped me figure out What I Want to do With My Life.

_Design for the Real World_, a book that got Papanek kicked out of the IDSA, really made me wake up and think about what it is I am doing and why.  The revised edition of _Design for the Real World_ is much better than the original, but the first paragraph stays the same:

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered shoe horns, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before (in the “good old days”), if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are carefully taught to young people.

Technorati Tags: design, life, papanek

This morning I was watching video of some flocking behavior and it it hit me that this is a perfect example of what Braitenberg is talking about in Vehicles when he describes “the law of uphill analysis and downhill invention”. A key reason for using thought experiments is that as outside observers, we are often unable to comprehend why something exhibits a specific behavior and are unable to build or define a structure that would exhibit a specific behavior. On the other hand, we are able to build simple things and understand their behavior because they are things we have created. His suggestion is that rather than spend lots of time and energy trying to analyze behavior from a top-down perspective, try building things from the bottom up and see if we can replicate the sort of behavior we’re trying to understand.

As a software type interested in kinetics and robotics, “top-down vs. bottom-up” is a very familiar argument. Every time I work on a distributed computing problem in CS, I (and my cohort) default to a top-down, control-the-flock algorithm that makes each element of the group do its thing. When I got into MIMD programming on supercomputers, I would solve problems by having different nodes exchange data needed to make decisions, but it was still “Thing A decides what to do after taking orders from or talking to thing B”.

I’m pretty certain birds aren’t having little chats about where they are headed next, and they’re probably not psychic, nor do they otherwise communicate with one another across space and time. My assumption (not being a biologist or psychiatrist) has always been that the “separation, alignment and cohesion” argument explains things; as a software type, it’s something I find easy to implement. How birds can see/think/react so quickly to small objects at a distance is beyond me, but again, I’m not a biologist.

Looking at things from Braitenberg’s perspective, what if it’s a much simpler solution? Perhaps the birds aren’t going through an observe/calculate/act cycle and are instead merely responding to the cues of their neighbors using learned behavior memorized (or evolved) during their lifetime. Pattern A results in Action A, Pattern B results in Action B, etc. If there’s an error — hey, that’s not pattern A — then a quick decision is made to either continue with Action A, go back to the previous action, or react in a new way to try and solve the problem.

I don’t know if that’s the right answer, but I’m starting to think about making some Arduino-based flocking robots for a little tabletop exercise. Even as a thought exercise that I never get around to building, it’s an interesting question. Can individual bots learn to flock based on keeping distance from things next to them and learning a set of patterns to repeat based on the movement of their direct neighbors?

If the flocking of birds, the action of ants and bees in colonies can be explained or modeled using this bottom up behavior (I suspect it can), how would we humans benefit by implementing similar, bottom-up mechanisms?

For example, why does Amazon need to collect all sorts of data about me (in an identifiable, non-anonymous database) just so I can get “other people who like what you like” style suggestions? Why do we need a centralized last.fm server to track all our listening histories — why not share it with people physically near me as I wander around town or post updates to my “Universal Friends List”?

On a more abstract level, instead of Master Control Programs sucking in data and spewing it back out, why can’t our MP3 players and book viewers and phones and laptops exchange information with nearby peers, constantly updating and exchanging anonymous lists of data, analyzing it, and reporting back to us?

Using the insect world as a parallel, what if all of our electronic devices behaved more like bees in a colony, each doing simple things with nearby (physically or electronically) devices leading towards a greater benefit for all? Do we really need our technology to be set up in a virtual army, taking orders from other systems in a hierarchy run by governments and international corporations?

Vehicles is an easy book to read and a hard book to describe. It really is one of those, “trust me, read it” books that you force on your friends until they read it just to get you to shut the hell up. Which, to me, is one of the best things you can say about a book.

Technorati Tags: Arduino, Braitenberg, review, Vehicles

Let me start by expressing my (probably unpopular) opinion: the vast majority of “conceptual art” has failed whatever purpose it was trying to serve. If I have to read a sign or a placard or a guide book to understand your art, then you have failed as an artist because your work did not communicate whatever it is you were trying to communicate. (And if I can’t understand what you’re trying to say after reading your explanation, maybe you should consider a new career.) I’m having a particularly dim view of “conceptual anything” right now, having recently visited the Carnegie Museum “Life on Mars” exhibit. There were some real gems here and there, but I still stand by my one sentence lolcat review:

“ART: UR DOIN IT RONG”

Now I can tell you this story that masquerades as a book review.

Recently my pal Golan Levin told me I should read hertzian tales in response to my blathering on about computational situational awareness, and I dug up a copy and put it on the “in” stack. When I saw the words “conceptual design” on the jacket I spit up a little bit in my throat and considered putting it way at the bottom of the stack. However, after seeing some of the work in the MOMA “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit, I realized I was probably being a little unreasonable and that I should at least give the book a fair chance. (More importantly, Golan is a very sharp sort who wouldn’t suggest I read something that would be a waste of my time.) The last time I was on a plane, I brought along it and a backup book just in case I got more than airsick.

I never cracked the other book. Dunne managed to both educate me about what conceptual design is and isn’t and really get me thinking even bigger questions than before about situational awareness and observing invisible spaces.

hertzian tales has two major components: the relationships between conceptual design, product design, and Hertzian space; and documentation of Dunne’s process in developing conceptual design pieces to investigate Hertzian space.

Dunne starts with a history and survey of conceptual design and product design. I think that many of us outside of capital-d design would probably describe “conceptual design” as “experimental design” — the design of objects not to fulfill a certain set of criteria, but to create either a physical or thought experiment that lets us gain a new perspective on some concept or object. These sorts of things can range from asking questions like “What if I had glasses that kept track of how much TV I watched and went dark if I’d watched too many hours in a given day?” or what sort of products would be useful for a lonely guy that had just been dumped by his girlfriend?

I like both of these because they don’t so much give you real answers as give you answers that make you ask more questions. What if my glasses went dark when I drove by a jumbotron screen, or just as a movie was ending? If I need “Accessories for Lonely Men”, which one should I get first, “Sheet Thief”, “Plate Thrower” or “Cold Feet”? It’s obvious what the products are going to do, who they are for, and why (in theory) someone would want such a thing. Well, maybe not. Do lonely guys really need reminders that they are lonely? Do I really want my TV watching regulated by glasses instead of common sense? Probably not, but thinking about these sorts of imaginary (and humorous, admit it, you laughed or at least smiled) products is a good way to open up one’s mind and think about existing technology and society from a new perspective.

Dunne’s survey of conceptual design projects is also useful in that he shows how they are relevant to the design of real products or how they change how we think about our relationships with technology and society. He doesn’t declare a bunch of truths because he’s an art professor, he substantiates his opinions with both factual history and well written arguments. As an example, I probably wouldn’t have taken Daniel Weil’s conceptual radios very seriously if I saw them in a museum, but Dunne gives them a context that helps me understand some of what Weil was attempting to do.

Having led us off with a history of products and technology, Dunne then moves into Hertzian space. The idea of Hertzian space is that all of our electronic devices radiate radio frequencies (RF) as part of their operation, and that is a new space for us to explore and observe. It’s usually not a device’s task to generate RF, it’s merely a side-effect of it being electronic. RF Interference (RFI) from all this radiated energy is enough of a problem that most nations have some sort of legal restrictions on how much RF can be emitted (or “leak”) from a device. In the US, turn over just about anything that uses batteries or plugs into a wall and look for the legalese about “FCC Part 15 compliance”. That’s the manufacture declaring that they’ve followed any rules that relate to how much RF is leaked from the device.

It’s not just radios, computers and mobile phones generating RF, it’s pretty much every technological component of our society. If electrical power runs through it, from the transformers on power poles to the alternator in your car’s engine to the washing machine in the basement or your wireless doorbell and garage door remote, it generates some sort of RF. (If you’re interested in learning more about RF interference or radio theory in general, check out amateur radio websites like the ARRL or EHAM.)

What Dunne asks us to think about is, What can we learn about ourselves from looking at the Hertzian space? What tools do we need to develop or use to look at this space? The book finishes with documentation of a couple of Dunne’s projects in this area, both at the personal/object level and at the city level.

In the end, the book is a kind of conceptual design project in and of itself — it lays out a bunch of information, takes you through a line of reasoning, and then chucks you off a cliff with a bunch of unanswered and open-ended questions about what you’ve just read. Dunne doesn’t make any claims to having answers, he just points you in the same general direction he’s headed and gives you a gentle shove.

Which is probably the sort of book I like reading the most these days. I’m tired of people telling me their answers, I want them to make me ask more questions. Even if you don’t agree with his opinions or like his projects, Dunne will leave you with more questions than answers.

(Edit: Anthony Dunne, on “design for debate” and a Bruce Sterling talk on speculative/science fiction interaction design.)

Anthony Dunne, hertzian tales. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005.

Technorati Tags: Dunne, design, hertzian space

Papanek and Hennessey’s primary focus is on both needless consumption and poorly designed things that people really don’t need. However, instead of a long rant against conspicuous consumption and designed-in obsolescence, they point out flaws in products and systems then suggest alternatives. Starting with the home bath and ending with community-level resources (like fire engines), many things we take for granted or assume cannot be improved upon are looked at with a critical eye. Their line of questioning includes things like, “how can this be improved?”, “why don’t we do this the way people in another country do?” to “do you really need this thing in the first place?”

These questions are ones that I think anyone interested in design or sustainability should be learning to ask about everything they encounter. An interesting proposal in response to over-consumption is shared ownership of resources and objects that one only occasionally uses. We do this for all sorts of things, from fire engines to library books, but why do we stop with institutions created in the past century?

For example, why don’t we share lawnmowers?

I own two — a reel mower that I normally use and a gas mower given to us by a relative. Both of my neighbors also own gas mowers, and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that any of my neighbors who don’t hire a gardener probably own a gas mower. When I use my mower, it’s rarely for more than 20-30 minutes every other week or so; the same is true for all the mowers my neighbors own.

So why do we all have to own our own mower, each requiring a fair amount of regular maintenance even though we only use each for a few hours a week? What if we each put a few bucks a week into the “mower fund” and were able to check a mower out from a local storage shed? (Similar arguments are made for shared deep freezers in apartment buildings and other shared appliances.)

And if we are all going to own so many mowers, do we all need gas mowers? I’ve mowed my yard with both the reel mower and the gas mower, and the reel mower tends to be faster, quieter, and easier to store. Factor in down-time for refueling, tweaking the spark plug, and the cost of gas/oil, and the reel mower starts to make a lot more sense, at least for smaller lawns. I’m pretty certain that my reel mower will also last much longer than the gas mower, and it cost about half what a new gas mower would cost.

Taking their argument a step further, why do we have grass lawns that require so much maintenance to begin with? Just because they were popular with the Victorians doesn’t mean we need to waste water growing plants just to keep them closely cropped. On a personal level, we’ve started redesigning our own front yard so that we will no longer need to mow or water it other than occasional spot watering during a drought. It just doesn’t make sense for us to water and maintain 500 square feet of grass simply because it’s green.

It’s this sort of process and thinking that makes the book of value. While many of the specific suggestions they make are irrelevant today (such as rethinking typewriters), the processes Papanek and Hennessey use to critically look at the world around us and improve things for the better.

Cite (if you’re interested in my generating BiBTeX refs in future reviews, please speak up):
Hennessey, James and Papanek, Victor. Why Things Don’t Work, Pantheon Books, 1977, 0-394-70228-X

Technorati Tags: design, hennessey, papanek, sustainability

An area I get distracted by often is tools for nomadic living. I grew up moving around a fair bit and I’ve spent much of my adult life dragging around a portable office of one sort or another. It used to be a leather Day Runner(tm), notebooks, a Sony Walkman(tm) and random art supplies; these days it’s a laptop, tri-band ham radio, sketchbook, iPod(tm), and random tools for safety and personal care.

What I haven’t thought enough about is the next step up from the overstuffed courier bag, actually taking my entire house and all my possessions from place to place on a regular basis. It’s one thing to move my office from home to cafe every day, but moving all my stuff from town to town on a regular basis? That’s something a bit more complicated, especially given how much crap I (as well as everyone else) tend to own.

Becoming a truly nomadic person seems to boil down to two simple steps:

Step 1: Get rid of all the crap you don’t need or put it in some permanent place. You’re going to need to do this before you get to the next step…

Step 2: Own only those things that are easily transported and that you absolutely need. One thing that most of us absolutely need is a bare minimum of furniture, and that’s where Nomadic Furniture comes into play.

Nomadic Furniture , by designers James Hennessey and Victor Papanek, is by not an exhaustive examination of all nomadic furniture but a basic overview of the fundamental types of furniture that people need and how those living the nomadic lifestyle can travel with the furniture they need.

It’s an interesting read now, as it was written in the 70s during the first big oil crunch. The attitude is dated but at the same time completely relevant in terms of the need to conserve energy, reduce consumption of resources, and follow the general model of reduce, reuse, recycle. (If you’ve read Cradle to Cradle, some of this will seem oddly familiar.)

Hennessey and Papanek don’t just show you pictures of furniture you can buy, rather they show you how you can make most furniture on your own. The diagrams are simple and straightforward and are such that they are easily modified and scaled to meet individual needs. Some of the plans are very much in the style of Danish Modern (or IKEA) while others seem a little quaint by contemporary standards. I doubt the dimensions for LPs and cassettes will be useful for many people making storage shelves in this century.

There are a couple of groups of people that I think would greatly benefit from reading this and photocopying some of the plans. The first group are college students who move on a regular basis and for whom saving every penny possible on furniture is worth a little labor. The second group are the true nomadic types, say hardcore burning man participants or people who travel and camp for weeks at a time. There are some creative sleeping and storage solutions in Nomadic Furniture that I will be trying out before our next trip to the playa.

There are only two problems with Nomadic Furniture that I feel the need to point out. The first is that it’s no longer in print, but used copies are easily found on amazon.com and half.com. The second problem is the nearly unreadable typography. I’ve been a huge fan of hand-illustrated and lettered manuals since my first copy of Muir’s How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot, but the strange typeface used in Nomadic Furniture is too much for me. It’s alien enough that the book is an amazingly difficult read, a distraction from the quite clean and readable illustrations.

Find it used, photocopy what you need, then sell/trade/give it to someone else who would find the information useful.

Cite (if you’re interested in my generating BiBTeX refs in future reviews, please speak up):
Hennessey, James and Papanek, Victor. Nomadic Furniture, Pantheon Books, 1973, 0-394-70228-X

Technorati Tags: design, furniture, hennessey, nomadic lifestyle, papanek

Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation is a brief guide to the history of innovation. It is a well researched look at how innovations really happen and the environments and contexts surrounding people praised as innovators. I suspect some of this is not news to people who worked in the dot-com boom or spent time in an R&D lab, but even those people would benefit from the structural interpretation Berkun gives to those environments.

Where this book falls short, in my opinion, is a lack of practical advice for people who need help fostering innovation in their departments or companies. It’s easy to say, “here’s how innovative organizations operate”, the challenge is in learning how to change your organization and convince management that there will be a benefit to the change. I can tell my boss about innovative companies until I’m blue in the face, but unless I can describe a plan with practical changes, my boss probably isn’t going to support me. If Berkun has experience helping companies change and become more innovative, I wish he’d revise this book with some real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t.

It’s a quick read at ~150 pages and there is a useful bibliography and guide to other books on the subject of innovation and creativity and certainly worth reading the next time you have a short flight or a layover.

Technorati Tags: creativity, innovation, The Myths of Innovation, reviews

I took a couple of weeks to decompress for school but I need to get back into the study groove. I have a lot of real work (the stuff that pays) to do, but I’m going to try and stick to a self-study schedule for design, security and Japanese in my free time.

My books on the “In” pile so far fall into two piles, design and security.

In the design pile:

• Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
• Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
• What Things Do — I haven’t read much design theory, so I might spread this out over several weeks so that it can soak in
• The Complete Japanese Joinery
  
• Industrial Strength Design ("What do you mean it’s not about EBM and stompy boots?")
• Universal Principles of Design
  

The stack of security books is big enough that I might end up skimming many of them:

• Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
• Physical Device Security
• Reversing
  
• Building Secure Software
  
• Silence on the Wire
  
• Security Warrior (could they have come up with more leet title?)

I’m also considering re-reading some of the classics that I read in school the first time around: Alexander’s design books, Foucault’s History of Science, that sort of thing. It’ll be interesting to see how much my worldly experience changes what I get out of the canon.

Technorati Tags: books, design, school, security, summer

In _designing for interaction_, Dan Saffer gives a concise and well-written introduction to the relatively new discipline of interaction design. This is the sort of book I’d love to see on a first-year design class reading list or in the careers section of a high school library. It’s also the sort of book that I’d give to any boss of mine that questioned the need to hire an outside designer for a project. (“Here, read this, then tell me if you still want to let engineering do everything on their own.”)

Saffer uses modern, popular technology (TiVo DVRs, mobile phones, web sites) as examples for interaction design or to illustrate his ideas. There are also a number of brief interviews with notables in the field giving their take on different design issues and concepts. These examples and interviews make the book more friendly and the reading experience is more enjoyable than the typical academic text.

Content is not sacrificed for accessibility nor is it dumbed-down for the non-designer. The basic framework and terminology of interaction design (and even design in general) are laid out in an easy to understand way. Terms or practices that might be unfamiliar to someone outside of design are clearly defined using plain English instead of design speak or computer jargon. Someone couldn’t go out and become a designer the day after reading this book but they would learn enough to lead them to further investigate interaction design as a career or to be able to make better decisions when hiring a designer or design firm.

designing for interaction, web site
O Danny Boy, Dan Saffer’s design blog

Technorati Tags: dan saffer, design, interaction design, review

Or does its effect on the reader matter more than which Dewey decimal digits get taped to the spine? Shaping Things gave me a well-needed kick in the head and got me thinking about some realities of ubiquitous computing in the near future.

When I think about past predictions for life in the age of omnipresent computing power — wearable PCs, portable VR, “smart”-whatevers — I’m reminded of why so much science fiction is utter drek. Instead of reaching out and thinking about how the future of technology will change our current life, too many authors take our current (or past) culture and spackle on future techno doodads without thinking about how that tech would actually change everyday life. (You know what I’m talking about: “It’s WWII, but with hover-tanks and grav-guns” or “It’s urban gang warfare in the gritty streets of the astroid belt.”)

The high tech business world suffers from the same sort of limited creativity, but I think it’s even more fundamentally ingrained in the culture and, unfortunately, rewarded more often than it is punished.

There’s a extended metaphor about a business cutting a path through a dense jungle. The workers cut down trees; the managers make sure the workers have sharp machetes and enough food and water and are cutting where they are supposed to be cutting; the leader is out climbing trees and telling the managers which way to go.

The problem is that I first heard that in a project management seminar for software development. When’s the last time anyone cleared a road through a forest with hand-tools and people climbing up trees? Why on earth is this being used as a metaphor for project management in a software development environment? How can one prognosticate about the effects of near-future technology on our life while still mired in 19th century management theory?

This is where I think Sterling’s experience in writing science fiction pays off in the design world. He’s able to leap ahead from what we have now based on what could be and not gussy up the present (or the recent past) in skiffy doodads and present it as THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE!.

Pat Cadigan has this to say:

“One of my favorite examples is people could have probably predicted a road system from the invention of the automobile and you might have been able to predict parking lots and difficulty in finding parking spaces, but you probably would not have necessarily predicted drive-in movie theaters, or making out in the back seat and people becoming parents in the back seat. “

This is the sort of thing Sterling is up to in Shaping Things: given the automobile and the motion picture, predict the drive-in. If not the drive-in, then at least driving school safety films, using cars as mount points for movie cameras, or at least POV movies like “Rendezvous”.

(Note: I’m going to handwave over a fair amount of the book and focus on the bit that kicked me in the head: the formal definition of the “spime”. There’s a lot of words about how we get to spimes, who handles spimes, what they do in the context of a future culture and what comes after, but I’ll leave that for some other time.)

A spime is an object capable of collecting information about its interaction with the world, track its own metahistory, and make that information available in a form useful to others. Sterling uses a familiar, ancient and decided non-technological object as the basis for his future spime: a wine bottle. He also spends a lot of time telling us how we got to spimes, what might follow, and how culture will change to adapt to these new inventions but that’s part of the stuff I’m handwaving over.

Whether or not we call these new objects “spimes”, “blobjects” or some other self-consciously coined word, the base concept is the same: a smart object that can observe its surroundings; collect, filter and store environmental data; report that data and even make decisions. This is a huge step forward in how we perceive the world and how it operates. Yes, it’s a huge step forward in the ability of conglomcos to refine their marketing messages but it’s also a huge step forward in tracking where garbage actually comes from and goes, finding inefficiencies in transportation (“my package sat how long on a loading dock in the rain?”), and learning the secret lives of everyday objects that most of us ignore.

Again we have the problem of “predict the drive-in”, but using the what-if tactics of science fiction in an iterative method might get us a bit further than the history-based product planning and market prediction routines from the past century used by the corporate world. We have a little experience of how simple information flow and collection can change the political, business and media landscapes and we can iterate on that for the next level of granularity with objects helping us manage those data flows.

For my part, this kick in the head has lead to my documenting “proto-spimes” in an effort to get my head around what a real spime might actually look like some day. Once I’ve got a few of those written up I’ll be able to go back and see what was wrong with the first and what they all have in common, re-read Shaping Things, then let it sink in again.

So be it manifesto, rant or design document, Shaping Things achieves the goal of kicking people (or at least me) in the head and getting them to think about the immediate future.

I only have one complaint about Shaping Things and it is a minor one: I do not like the layout nor the color selections used in the book. I’m not color blind but I did read most of it in low light on airplanes, conditions for which the book was apparently not designed. The combination of glossy paper and low-contrast colors made it more difficult to read than it should have been.

Technorati Tags: Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, industrial design, spimes, futurism

Cranz — a Professor of Architecture at Berkeley — boils down the history of chairs, sitting, and ergonomics in plain terms that can be understood by the lay person. This history helps explain the ergonomic nightmare we live in today and suggestions on ways we can start to improve our situation.

I’ve always been (too?) willing to question elements of the world I live in, however where I sit has never been on my list of things to question. I don’t like sitting in chairs nor sitting up straight; I prefer to lounge, lie down or sit on the floor while reading, watching TV and even when doing metal work or fabrication. While this leads to interesting discussions at home about who is hogging the couch or why there are magazines spread all over the floor, it’s never led to my thinking about why I try so hard to avoid sitting in chairs. My job requires me to sit for extended periods of time (and I have worker’s comp RSI receipts to prove it) but when I’m doing something I want to do, I’m often standing at a workbench, sitting on a stool with rollers or squatting on the floor.

A few years ago I accidentally started studying Japanese wood and metal working techniques while studying Japanese history and modern Japanese design. One of things that surprised me was the number of modern Japanese craftsmen who to this day sit on the floor while doing rather difficult labor. Even an episode of Discovery’s Biker Build-Off showed the Japanese bike firm Zero Engineering working the way Japanese metalworks worked for centuries: sitting on the floor.

As it turns out, sitting in chairs at a workbench or table is the odd way of doing things in the big historical picture. Until the industrial age, plenty of people sat on floors or stood while working. If the average person was (is) lucky enough to have something upon which to sit, it was likely a bed, bench or simple stool without a back to lean against.

Not only did The Chair open my eyes to the “pro-chair” Western bias that we have sold to ourselves and other cultures, it also helped me understand just how much of modern chairs is form and how little is function. I never really understood why the really expensive designer chairs we had at work or the fancy chairs my friends bought were so uncomfortable. The simple fact of the matter is, they’re supposed to look good, not be useful chairs. These chairs were not furniture, they were art. Now there’s nothing wrong with filling your house with expensive art, but expecting your guests to sit on the art and be uncomfortable is another matter entirely.

The act of sitting in a chair, especially for extended periods of our waking hours, is a modern invention and something our bodies were not designed to do. We did not evolve sitting in chairs, they were thrust upon us (or us upon them) over the period of a few short centuries. This is stating the obvious, but the unstated obvious is that our bodies don’t like it one bit. We are suffering many health problems related to chairs and the sedentary lifestyle they encourage: back and neck pains, varicose veins, RSI injuries and so on. Making matters worse is the use of chairs that are picked not for their functionality or long-term effects on the human body, but for their form and cost.

The solutions are simple: stop sitting, sit differently or at least minimize the amount of time spent sitting. Solutions like these are easy to say but not easy to implement in a chair-based culture that is focused on short-term benefits . The average American is probably not used to sitting on a backless chair for hours on end or standing while working at their computer. “Perching”, or making a tripod of your legs and a chair, is also going to take some getting used to for many people. Sitting in chairs has destroyed our muscle tone and posture so much that what should be a simple task — standing or sitting up straight without any sort of support — is difficult for most people. The next time you’re in a “waiting” situation, in a doctor’s room or waiting on take-out at a restaurant, try standing instead of sitting and see how long you last.

Another problem facing a change in how we sit is the relationship between employer and employee. Some of these solutions — which would require spending as much on an employee’s chair as you do on their computer if you expect them to sit for several hours a day — are not going to go over well with the business community. I’ve done facilities management consulting a few times, and it’s amazing how much a company will spend on a computer that will be replaced in a year and how little they will spend on a chair and desk they expect to last for a decade. Spending $300 on an office chair when there’s one available for $250 requires extensive justification, while buying everyone a new PC every year for $1000 is obviously a good decision. Complicating matters, many employers will not let employees bring their own chairs to use at work, so an employee who’d rather perch or stand can’t even pay for it out of their own pocket.

Unlike many books I’ve read in the past few years, The Chair has made a quick and positive difference in my every day life. I sold my Aeron and have a Hag Capisco (designed for “perching” not “sitting”) on order. I bought a cheap-but-comfortable task chair in the meanwhile, ripped the arms off and sit forward on the seat with my feet elevated enough to take the weight off of my thighs. In the few months I’ve been working with better posture, I’ve noticed that I can stand for longer periods of time, that I don’t have achy legs after working all day and that my infrequent migraines and frequent neck-aches have all but disappeared.

I think the best possible thing I can say about Cranz’s The Chair is that it’s one of the few books I’ve ever bought extra copies of to give to co-workers and friends.

Technorati Tags: chairs, industrial design, ergonomics, books, furniture

TeX Dorkery: