Global blue chip companies are throwing their weight into VR development (hardware and software),  Mark Zuckerberg believes “this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people”.

Andrew Lockley (→ https://www.exponentialinvestor.com/author/andrew-lockley/   ) discussed this (3/o3/2017) with Eliott Myers from Roto VR, which is a small, innovative firm with designs on the related accessories market.  He claims that “Roto enhances the seated experience with haptic feedback so dramatically you feel like you’re really there, in another world. Once you’ve tried Roto, VR feels empty without it.  With Roto, you can add our Table accessory, so you can drive around 360 degrees with a steering wheel (and pedals). Roto also has “rumble shakers” which can be affixed to the underside and back of the chair for added sensations. It’s like 4D on steroids. Actually we should call it 360D!”

Sounds exciting!

But not if the chair is liable to induce backache (LBP) on prolonged use. Their picture ( http://www.rotovr.com  ) shows an upright chair with their concomitant disadvantages and with it’s extra, probably excellent, VR additions.

A huge opportunity

VR and sitting, if prolonged, will be relevant to chair design. It would not be difficult to redesign this chair to take advantages of the 2T or 4M concepts and so correct it’s seemingly obvious, from the pictures,  ergonomic deficiencies  This would have the additional advantage that the firm would have the basis for an ergonomic optimised office work chair that would jump ahead of the field.

If you are in the mood have a look at ☛ The global future? →

Comment

From Gorman JD. MA (Cantab.) (Mechanical Sciences) MI.Mech.E (Member of Institution of Mechanical Engineers). MMCA (Member of the McTimoney Chiropractic Association) on 7/March 2017.

Yes I agree that a typical office chair and the typical office chair slump is wrong. Certainly semi reclined  position is one solution. I have rather given up trying to predict how the sitting world (the world of Homo Sedens) will evolve. It is certainly slow in recognising the problem which would be the first step.   This chair looks to me like a cheap after-market car seat. The computer people probably have no interest in the chair/seat so gave it no thought so long as it looked fairly high tech.     john g.

Reply from Dr HA Sanford MA MB BChir (Cantab) D Phys Med (Lond).

You are probably right.   Then, I am not an expert on car seating like yourself.   Henry

Comment from Dr HA Sanford

Virtual Reality (VR) is taking me back to ‘The Brave New World’ of Aldous Huxley (1932) which I read at school.   He described a dystopic utopian hierarchical society that kept control with consumerism, drugs (Soma) and VR (Feelies).  Work was done by robots and everyone was free to relax and enjoy promiscuous sex. Sounds similar to what may happen now.

This work was superceded by ‘1984′ by George Orwell, who was at my Prep school some 20 years before me, and hated it.  We all did but did not go into print so viciously.  ’1984’ faced the more immediate threat of Marxism which has now intellectually collapsed due to it’s internal contradictions and misunderstanding of the human condition.   So we are now back with ‘Brave New World’.   It does not sound too bad but actually is a form of slavery.  Those who objected, wanting to think, were regarded as barbarians and exiled.    To Iceland (as far as I can remember).  I used to run an annual course there (See the photographs in HOW WE SIT NOW→.)  The people are wonderful and it is very pleasant (in summer).

So, VR, here we come!    HAS

Sitting Is Deadly. Could Banning Chairs Help?

Peter Bessey (he did the CADs for me) sent me this link,

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3068098/evidence/sitting-is-deadly-could-banning-chairs-help

My initial reaction was that this was way OTT.  On second thoughts I realised that I had been saying something similar since 1998. As a consultant in Muscle-skeletal (Orthopaedic) medicine my interest was to remediate the factors that could lead to spinal breakdown.  Later, my general medical practice long past, I realised that there were also general medical adverse, potentially terminal,  effects.  It was mentioned under ‘Sitting Disease’ in    Chair DESIGNERS & Low Lumbar Backache

My own view is that sitting at work is not dead but should be transformed into a workstation incorporating the 2T (or 4M) concept.   Sit/Sand systems are also a help.   HAS 18/2/2017.

The End of Sitting 

 Summary of the work by RAAAF.    This is an installation by the interdisciplinary Dutch studio RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances) and lies at the crossroads of architecture, visual art and philosophy.   In our society almost the entirety of our surroundings have been designed for sitting.

Redesigning the workplace environment and home might manipulate an impact on sedentary behavior.  Their installations are mostly conceptual.  But they bring up an interesting idea: What if chairs were eliminated altogether? Is that even possible? And would that solve work and societal sitting problems or just open up the door to new problems?

The RAAAF installations The End of Sitting, which debuted in 2014, and Breaking Habits, opening at the Mondriaan Fund for Visual Arts in Amsterdam February 16, present chair-free environments that encourage people to get up and move. As Erik Rietveld puts it, “As long as there are chairs present, people will sit in them habitually.”

The End of Sitting – Cut Out marks the beginning of an experimental trial phase, exploring the possibilities for a radical change in the way we work in 2025. This project is a follow-up of the architectural art instalation made in Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam by RAAAF. It is cut out of the landscape of standing affordances and includes the most successful positions for supported standing. It allows visitors to stand, lean, hang or lay down while interacting, reading or working. The visitor is both participant and spectator. This travelling exhibition allows everyone to experience the future of the standing office.

Slideshow Credits: 01 / Photo: Jan Kempenaers via RAAAF; 02 / Photo: Jan Kempenaers via RAAAF; 03 / Photo: Jan Kempenaers via RAAAF; 04 / Photo: Ricky Rijkenberg via RAAAF; 05 /Photo: Ricky Rijkenberg via RAAAF;

The concept seems to be that of a Sit & Stand complex.  See Sit Stand & stools →.   Even an office of this sort may have environment adverse effects for the health of staff.  See →

The future may be much better, or worse,  than most people think. It’s going to “arrive” sooner than they imagine.

Ray Kurzweil – explains  “Now back to the future: it’s widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected the future to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Although exponential trends did exist a thousand years ago, they were at that very early stage where an exponential trend is so flat that it looks like no trend at all. So their lack of expectations was largely fulfilled. … An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.”

Michael Bess, professor of history at Vanderbilt University in the United States, opines  “There will be some fantastic benefits from these technologies, and some really potentially cataclysmic dangers. The idea is to go slow, because we need to be careful. We need to give ourselves time to adapt to the power that these changes are going to exert on our life as individuals and in society as a whole. .. Within the wealthy countries, it could exacerbate the rift between the rich and the poor. On a global scale, it’s going to be even worse. I become worried that over time, if there are several generations of enhancements that have gone forward and that rift keeps widening, you will see a fragmentation of the species based on whether they have been able to get access to these things or not.”

The Third Industrial Revolution.

David Brown, entrepreneur, angel investor and the creator of the blockbuster drug Viagra, suggests that  we are living through what he calls the Third Industrial Revolution. His theory is that each revolution is driven by a combination of three things:

1. a new energy source, 1, coal, 2.oil, 3. ?solar..
2. a new means of communication. 1. steam-powered printing press 2.the telegraph 3. ?the internet.
3. and a new source of finance. 1. the stock exchange. 2. the limited company 3. ? peer-to-peer lending and other internet-driven forms of finance.

 … What’s the definition of a bank? It lends money to a broad customer base. These internet companies have massive customer bases – a billion customers with no infrastructure costs – and they’ve got money. Apple’s got $200 billion in cash. Banks are bust! It just takes one step now: for Apple and Google to start lending, and they are then replacing the current banking system.

Genetic editing

We’re talking about memory in the way early computer developers (really early – think 1940s) had to find ways of turning information into a signal that could be read, understood and stored by a machine. In a similar vein, researchers have found a way of getting the DNA in your cells to record certain information that can then be read back later.

Medically, that information is basic: we can record “events”, like whether any inflammation occurred, as well as for how long it lasted and how severe it was. But the ultimate goal of the research is to get our DNA to store more complex information about the progression of an illness or the performance of a drug.

As Timothy Lu, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and of biological engineering, put it: “To enable a deeper understanding of biology, we engineered human cells that are able to report on their own history based on genetically encoded recorders.” 

This breakthrough, like so many others, would not have been possible without CRISPR.

First off, what exactly is CRISPR?   It stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It’s sometimes referred to as CRISPR/Cas9. But what we call it isn’t half as interesting as the fact that it enables us to do something no civilisation before us has ever had the ability to do – to edit the genetic makeup of living things and remake ourselves the way we want to be.   It will go down in history as the most significant breakthrough of the century.

In the middle of the last (20th) century, Francis Crick and James Watson , at Cambridge, discovered the structure of DNA. Let’s call that the birth of modern genetic research. It was akin to us finding the instruction manual for the human body.   A half a century later in 2000 and the Human Genome Project decoded a genome for the very first time. That gave us the ability to read the instruction manual (or parts of it).

CRISPR enables us is to rewrite the book altogether – to cross out parts we don’t want, swap whole pages with those of another book, to create an entirely new book if we like. That’s a major shift. It changes our involvement from passive study and understanding of the subject, to active involvement, re-engineering things the way we want them to be.  It is an emerging technology. But its uses are multiplying seemingly by the day.  The doctor behind the experiment called it: “A landmark in the use of new gene engineering technology and the effects on this child have been staggering. “If replicated, it could represent a huge step forward in treating leukaemia and other cancers.”

“CRISPR is a geneticist’s dream come true,” said oncology expert and Novartis researcher Rob McDonald in a 2016 interview. “CRISPR enables us to do experiments that one could only dream of before.” In short, it enables scientists to look into thousands of genes related to cancer. The goal is to find a “kill switch” – the gene or genes that are vital to the survival of the cancer. Find this and you can engineer drugs that hit this target with precision.”  This has helped lead to a major project lead by the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, known as the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopaedia. The goal is to turn genomic information of cancer data and tumour biology into more therapeutically useful information.

That tackles a disease that’s already developed in a patient. But what if we could remake our genetic profiles so that we were entirely immune to certain diseases?   In an attempt to create immunity against HIV by “cutting” the offending genetic material away UMass Medical School researchers are using CRISPR/Cas9.  “On the simplest level, we’re employing a very precise pair of scissors to go in and clip out all, or part of, the HIV genome and reattach the severed ends of the human genome,” said principal co-investigator Scot Wolfe, PhD, associate professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology. “If we could do that, the hope is that this would be a step on the road to getting a functional cure for HIV.”

The number of clinical uses of CRISPR – and gene editing more widely – is growing all the time. As well as cancer and HIV, researchers around the world have had preliminary success using CRISPR against cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anaemia.

There are more controversial uses, such as creating mosquitos that are genetically engineered to wipe out the rest of their species (by breeding with them only to have offspring that are incapable of breeding) in an effort to combat malaria and the Zika virus.

Superhumans and the Jetsons fallacy

The author Michael Bess put it that when we imagine the future, we envisage a world in which technology is many times more advanced, but humans are essentially the same as they are today. He calls it the “Jetsons fallacy”: based  on a TV show set in the year 2062. It became a household show. Everyone was watching it. And it depicted a world in the future where cars fly and people can be transported in pneumatic tubes and there are robots everywhere, but the people are exactly the same as the people of 1962.

Consider the other side of the debate? What about using these techniques to enhance healthy people, rather than treat or prevent disease?  Given the potential uses of CRISPR and other genetic editing techniques in the treatment or prevention of illness, it seems near certain that gene editing will become a major industry – and perhaps even a major part of life. It is easier to win the moral argument against altering the building blocks of life if you’ve developed a cure for cancer or heart disease. The benefits to humanity are obvious and immediate.

There’s been a line drawn in the sand between the two uses so far.   Marcy Darnovsky of the Centre for Genetics and Society (an organisation dedicated to looking at human biotechnologies from a social justice, human rights and public interest perspective), who put it like this: ‘When someone has a disease that’s threatening their life or their health, then yes, let’s try to treat them with gene therapy. But when it comes to modifying genes that we’re going to pass onto our children and to every cell in their bodies, and that’s irreversible, and that’s going to be passed on to all their offspring: that’s where we think the line has to be drawn’.

The line has been drawn many countries and by one international treaty – the Council of Europe treaty that the UK has not signed. The UK itself actually does have a national law against human germline modification, which is why Parliament had to vote on that mitochondrial manipulation technique.

Sarah Gray, of the American Association of Tissue Banks, made that same point in a more emotional, but no less relevant, way. Gray gave birth to a son with anencephaly and suffered seizures for six days until he died. As she told a National Academy of Sciences summit on gene editing, “If you have the skills and the knowledge to eliminate these diseases, then freakin’ do it.” 

As these technologies advance, they will make it possible to safely and effectively modify the DNA  of human embryos genetically. This is a choice we are going to have to make. Is this something we want to do or not? Because it’s going to become technologically and medically possible.

We have a technology that allows us to remake the world ourselves as we want – or think we want – it to be. The potential uses are virtually limitless. That creates a massive incentive to explore and push the limits of what we’re able to do.  How to use that power is going to be the most important story of the century.

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution has begun

A time in human history. when we eradicate killer diseases, add decades to the average human lifespan and when we master the art of creating machines capable of superintelligent levels of thought and skill, there’s one revolutionary breakthrough that’s going to be at the heart of almost everything that happens – the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

• Energy technology: wind, tidal and PV generation, batteries and fuel cells.
• Consumer technology such as smart appliances, plug-in electric vehicles and social networks.
• Grid and operational technology – such as automated demand side response, microgrids and condition-based predictive maintenance
• Information technology (IT) such as the Internet of Things, cloud, and big data.

Assistive technology

Robotics will actually improve our lives in a huge number of different ways.  It isn’t just the branch of technology that will ultimately put millions out of work as every job on the planet gets automated.  There are two categories

1. Robotics that will assist us: to help us do things our bodies just can’t or won’t do. For instance, helping paraplegic people to walk again.  The Walk Again Project in Brazil announced that they’d helped eight paraplegic people to walk again using a combination of virtual reality, robotic exoskeletons and brain-computer interfaces.
2. The second category is technology that enhances our abilities, using technology to help us do things we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. Robots are already in our factories, increasingly in our homes and providing us with entertainment.

Robotics

In the 2nd category, while the vast majority of uses are peacefully mundane,  robots can be used as military tools.The USA’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to have suits would allow soldiers to walk further, carry more equipment, offer protection from the elements and allow them to arrive less fatigued. It is easy to imagine this projected into, to me, inapproptiate superhuman soldier or killer robots.

Daewoo is experimenting with a powered suit for its shipyard workers that allows them to lift a 30kg piece of iron with ease. In a shipyard where that kind of activity is mundane, there are obvious advantages to pairing the sensitivity of a human with the brawn of a robot.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster several Japanese robotics firms developed special exoskeleton suits to enable people to reach otherwise inaccessible places.

Sam Volkering – futurist and financial advisor – “

It’s going to effectively change the structure of social groups, in that our definition of work is currently: you get up, you go to work, spend your day at work, come home. In the last 50-odd years robotics has replaced a lot of labour-intensive roles. You see it a lot in manufacturing now: manufacturing plants use a lot of stationary robotics. 

We’re now seeing a trend where robots or automated systems are starting to eat their way into middle-class jobs. You’ve got robo-advisors providing financial recommendations based on a huge amount of data input. So any kind of job that requires a bit of muscle power, or any reasonably repetitive work like bookkeeping – they’re just going to be replaced by automated systems or robotics. Things like self-driving cars – taxis, truck drivers, bus drivers – are not going to be needed, because why get a human to do a job that you can get a robot to do more safely, more reliably, and more consistently over a long period of time and at ultimately lesser cost?

That’s going to create more creative, highly skilled jobs, and jobs that perhaps don’t exist today that no one can predict. It’s going to be a shift of what we know as work. You might end up with three or four jobs on the go. There’s no such thing as a career anymore. You end up with several jobs as your work – micro-work. 

That’s going to mean a shift of where people go physically to work, and how they interact and communicate with each other on a daily basis. It’s not going to be about getting up and going to the office, then going home. You might get up, go to a hub somewhere, interact with a bunch of people on one of your jobs. Then work from home for a couple of hours and then have to go to another community set. That’s going to create issues with transport and things like that. 

Work is such an important part of our social fabric that when there’s a big shift in what it looks like, it’s going to create a lot of ancillary fluctuations in infrastructure: where we go, energy usage in various locations, etc. 

People don’t like change, so that’s going to cause a lot of problems. You’re going to find a lot of people ending up out of work who haven’t had the foresight to reskill or retrain. It’s going to put a strain on economies, because they’re not going to be able to handle these people out of work, and there’s going to be a shortage of people needed for the high-skilled jobs that this change is going to create.”

The OFFICE OF THE FUTURE (and maybe ‘near future’).

2018.  Sam Volkering – futurist and financial advisor – “In the last 50-odd years robotics has replaced a lot of labour-intensive roles. You see it a lot in manufacturing now: manufacturing plants use a lot of stationary robotics.    … automated systems are starting to eat their way into middle-class jobs. You’ve got robo-advisors providing financial recommendations based on a huge amount of data input.   That’s going to create more creative, highly skilled jobs, and jobs that perhaps don’t exist today that no one can predict. It’s going to be a shift of what we know as work. You might end up with three or four jobs on the go. There’s no such thing as a career anymore. You end up with several jobs as your work – micro-work. 

That’s going to mean a shift of where people go physically to work, and how they interact and communicate with each other on a daily basis.    Work is such an important part of our social fabric that when there’s a big shift in what it looks like, it’s going to create a lot of ancillary fluctuations in infrastructure: where we go, energy usage in various locations, etc. … It’s going to put a strain on economies, because they’re not going to be able to handle these people out of work, and there’s going to be a shortage of people needed for the high-skilled jobs that this change is going to create.”

(Quoted via Nick O’Connor (Publisher, Exponential Investor and recently published in his book … .

If interested, a personal view of the future can be seen at The Global Future? →… Largely based on the research of Nick O’Connor.  .

Alternatively

For another view – Should chairs be banned? See  workchairs-a-new-breed-

Suggested by the interdisciplinary Dutch studio RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances) and lies at the crossroads of architecture, visual art and philosophy.   In our society almost the entirety of our surroundings have been designed for sitting.  Evidence from medical research suggests that prolonged sitting results in serious health deficits.   These are so widely studied and well-documented that they’re impossible to ignore and show that sitting increases lower back pain, slows our metabolisms, and shortens our life-spans, amongst other things. Not even daily exercise is enough to offset the damage.

Redesigning the workplace environment and home might manipulate an impact on sedentary behavior.  Their installations are mostly conceptual.  But they bring up an interesting idea: What if chairs were eliminated altogether? Is that even possible? And would that solve work and societal sitting problems or just open up the door to new problems?

May I be so bold as to suggest that….

•  Ergonomic chair design seems to have come to the end of the road without huge success in avoiding LBP.
• A new ‘fix’ is in order and can be effected by the 2T concept.   A ‘paradigm change’?
• This can only be achieved by an understanding of the  biomechanics. It is hoped that this work may provide you with this, a resource describing the requirements for safe design.
• By incorporating the points made in this work,  comfort and ergonomics of both the simplest and most advanced ‘ergonomic’ chairs  should be improved .
• You must not be  misled by ‘comfort’, that treacherous guide  which only turns up truthfully when the bio-mechanics (ergonomics) are fully correct.  See ☛ Comfort→
•  Remediating the ergonomics is more important. Comfort is improved the nearer a full remediation  is approached.  Full remediation = maximum comfort.
• The correct search should be for the Hippocratic “Do no harm”.
• Bio-mechanic adverse designs can be avoided.  Why? Mandal’s Homo sedens→
• There is now no excuse for poorly designed chairs and the conventional mis-advice that is perpetuated.   ☛ Various chairs→
• Some selling points to manufacturers and architects are added if required.
• The comment of Kenichi Ohmae (below) is apposite.

What’s the crossover between form and function; sculpture and good design? If you appreciate art and sculpture then your eye will be drawn to pleasing shapes.     Aesthetics are hardly the subject matter of bio-mechanics and is left to the individual designer and the company image.   However there is relevance to chair design and furniture seen as art.   My apologies for this discursive effusion which was occasioned by seeing,  in 2015, a new chair proposed by Altwork (http://altwork.com). that has at least an upright and reclined work position as I first proposed back in 1998.  It also has a ‘stand’ facility so in this respect is approaching the 2T derivative, the 4M OFFICE WORK-STATION. I have not seen this chair and so cannot assess the extent to which it is 2T compliant.    From the photographs there seem to be problems.  It looks over engineered, awkward  and clunky.   WORK-CHAIRS, a new breed with a reclined mode.→

See the Cambridge student model which does the same thing and is simpler and cheap

 The model shown above was an upgrade of my P1 prototype.   It was of this that a CEO said “This is too comfortable.   My work-force will go to sleep” although he was lying on wood with no upholstery’  (Early 2Tilt chair CONCEPT and criticism→).

 It looks surprisingly similar to the Kragel’s Nap Chair which is regarded as an art object and was shown by Jessi Reeves  in her first solo exhibition at the Bridget Donahue Gallery. nvc. in 2015.   “The symbiosis of art and design culminates in Jessie Reave’s work which hovers between furniture and art object. Reaves’ creates conventional (and functioning) items you would find in any furniture shop: chairs, a couch, lamps, several shelving units. However, the artist assembles materials unconventionally to create an entirely unique aesthetic.; what is normally kept hidden inside furniture is turned out.”     Reaves recently had a solo show at New York’s Bridget Donahue gallery.  “
This looks very like my P1 2T prototype of 1998.  The back support looks excessive and is adverse lumbar rather than a pelvlc support.  It looks adjustable which might account for this.  Shown as an art object it shows the basic simplicity of the 2T concept.

Having been married to a highly innovative abstract artist,  ☛ http://www.vancaillieartist.co.uk→  I have views!   Back in the 1960’s some regarded me as one of the few in England who could asses the aesthetics of the avant garde at that time.  Abstract Expressionism. Matter Painting,Tubism (Mathieu), Tachism, Pop etc.   Alas! Now I am totally dated!  But reactions do not fade.  True art has an effect that distinguishes it and is always itself true.   “Truth is beauty.  Beauty is truth” said Keats.   The untruthfull in art such as propaganda was demanded of artists in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and their derivatives such as ‘Social Realism’.    A reasonably good English artist, Richard Hamilton, was persuaded by his ‘Ban the Bomb’ CND wife to depict Hugh Gaitskill as a Hitleresque monster.  Obviously untrue.  To my mind, it destroyed  his artistic integrity.  Artists, although maybe dissatisfied with a work, never produce a bad picture, even with scribbles on a napkin.  I have a Calder drawn around a wine stains on a catalogue of his work.  We can be moved by nostalgia.  This is something else.   Alfred Munnings was anti modern art but his portraits of beautiful women, beautifully turned out and mounted on beautiful horses are nostalgic of an age recently past.

True art can evoke excitement and a ‘prickling’ & tingling physiological effect now known as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) in the presence of certain work.  This can occur with sophisticated connoisseurs, and equally the naive.     Robert Graves in his ‘White Goddess’ (1948 – The White Goddess : a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth -London: Faber & Faber) describes this effect and attributed it to the true  measure of a poet to faithfulness in depicting the White Goddess, of ancient tradition who was worshipped under many titles and forms, whether nymph, mother or crone, of the early matriarchal societies, thus proving the truth and source of his or her mystical inspiration.   Matriarchy, to be overthrown by invading patriarchal Indo-europeans, may have never existed but these emotional and physiological effects can be observed in poetic, musical and visual art forms.  “All true art is sacred” replied my wife (vancaillieartist.)  when asked why one of her works , an abstract relief, could be regarded as religious, and was requested for the exhibition of sacred art at the Musée d’Art Modeme, Paris, “Art Sacrée”, 1965.

For me, the most interesting exhibit at Olympia, 100% Design exhibition, 2015, was this incredibly engineered and simple construct by Danial Chow  →.  Of solid walnut “Brackets or bracings that conventionally structure the architecture are substituted by hidden beaming inserts, invisible from outside”. He also wrote to me “Thanks for all the input you inspired me.  I will begin paying attention such a new measure – pelvic support or pelvic stimulator in my future designs.  I speculate that the said may also help stimulate the central nerve of the user while sitting.   It could then be the “real” solution and a new era also revolutionary to long time siting/working.     I may consider adopting this to working chairs and lounge chairs.”       I do not know about “stimulate the central nerve of the user”.  Sounds exciting!    He later wrote  “I did more thinking.  I realised it is possible to incorporate pelvic supports at the two sides of the lower-back-rest.  Perhaps I can design and make a new lower-back-rest to test the effect.  By the way, did I explain about how I came up with the configuration – dimensions and angles?   I did a mockup with a range of different configurations.  I picked the set which comforts the user most.”

Danial Chow, not an expert on biomechanics, has certainly ‘got an eye’.  As does any true artist.   I hope I have not misled him on iliac support.  Designed for upright sitting  it is less important for a reclined mode.  It would still help somewhat and some contouring would look good.  (see,BACKRESTS. Pelvic support→)

Similar, also aesthetically pleasing, in 2018, is a work in carbon fibre by ‘Essence of Strength’ .   It does not have any ‘Pelvic support’ .  Pads are supplied to correct this deficiency which should have been unnecessary with better design.   <https://www.essenceofstrength.co.uk/>.    Although not intended as a work chair, the ideal ergonomic shape should approximate to that of the 2T (3M) reclined mode.    The 2Tilt RECLINED MODE for fully safe sitting.

This may be relevant to Furniture as Art (FaA) where so much are just amusing nonsense which some may find desirable.  To be ‘true’ and excite ‘desire’ for the object it must have relevance to the human body that is going to use it.   This means bio-mechanics.   Preferably an understanding is the best but  may also be achieved on a sub-concious level by an artist.   “It’s all in the eye” said my wife, explaining composition and the golden section.

Wolfson seems to me to be have serious intent and to be the classic in this genre.  Of course he does not read work on bio-mechanics and so was unaware that desks in offices are becoming to look Dickensian (4M OFFICE WORK-STATION)  But desks which are objects of desire will still be used in private offices.

The observer or user decides whether the object is pleasurable, relevant and desirable.  The designer takes this into account. an ‘eye’ is a help even if the ergonomics are correct.

Without a nod towards biomechanics, some schools may be seen – dada, surrealism.

For my money an ‘Object of Desire’ is a modern version of the old Army Roorkhee chairs.   I have 4 of the originals and cover this subject at the end of the post EASY CHAIRS.

.

Anecdotally the first criticism of the 2T concept, back in 1998, was from a CEO “This is too comfortable. My staff will go to sleep”. Although he was lying on the P1 prototype with no upholstery whatever, just correctly shaped ply-wood. I responded that a nap might benefit productivity and it was unreasonable to keep staff awake with uncomfortable chairs.   I was unaware of the later research.    (see ☛ Sleep→ in the early 2T concept under ‘criticism’.)

Vincent Walsh, professor of human brain research at University College, London, suggested that a sleep of between 30 and 90 minutes in the afternoon could help companies improve productivity. A
poll of 2000 UK office workers by the energy drink manufacturer, ‘Lucozade’ (2013), 22% reported having fallen asleep at their desks, usually in mid afternoon, due to an energy slump, usually lasting about 47 mins and associated with large lunches, sleep deprivation, alcohol and ‘unhealthy’ snacks. Research at the University of Michigan found that the subjects who had taken a nap felt less impulsive, and weathered frustration more easily, than those who watched a nature video (No ref). (See ☛Uptake?/Implications?→)

METRONAP

The MetroNaps EnergyPod is intended as a sleep module for users who wish to take a nap.  The hood allows it to become a semi Pod. It is of interest as it could be incorporated into a 2T chair (3M or 4M) and contain the monitor etc.

On their website they say “In recent years, countless studies have extolled the virtues of napping.  A quick power nap can sharpen your focus , boost creativity, and mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation. But if you work a 9 to 5 at an office, how can you fulfill your nap quota without being called out for sleeping on the job?If you work at the posh offices of Google, The Huffington Post or Cisco Systems Inc., you take a break from your desk and slip into your own private “sleeping pod.” The $13,000 pods are the brainchild of Christopher Lindholst and Arshad Chowdhury, who have been preaching the benefits of napping at work since they opened their company MetroNaps in 2004. Starting out as a retail operation, MetroNaps now manufactures a line of sleep pods and acts as a kind of “sleep consultant” for companies, offering guidance on how to work napping into a work culture that they say is becoming increasingly accepting of the idea.”

Arianna Huffington, Editor in Chief, Huffington Post Media Group“When we first started the nap rooms, a year and a half ago, people were reluctant to use them. Now, we need to open a third one; they are so overbooked. People blog even about the impact it has on them to just get 20 minutes in the middle of the afternoon.” – As quoted in CBS This Morning, June 12, 2012 http://www.metronaps.com→

From  An Australian  ‘sleep solutions’ provider’

•  https://www.ahbeard.com.au/sleepcoach/5-things-you-should-know-about-your-sleep-work-and-productivity/
• Sleep influences creativity and innovation.  Lack of sleep affects the prefrontal cortex of the brain – the area responsible for innovation, creativity, and self-control. A 1999 study found that going 24 hours without sleep noticeably impairs our ability to think flexibly or make updates to plans in light of new information. So it’s not just the quantity of tasks we get through each day that sleep influences, it’s the quality.
•  Sleep deprivation and stress go hand in hand.   “In the sleep world, stress is to sleep as yin is to yang — opposite forces that are forever linked,” says Chris Winter, M.D. “Stress prevents sleep. Sleep deprivation increases stress and its consequences.”
•  We need to switch off.   As our cities and societies become increasingly active 24 / 7, our working hours follow suit. Not to mention, these days we quite literally carry our work around in our pockets. While our smartphones make our lives more convenient in many ways, they come with the cost of never really switching off – and it’s becoming more prevalent. Our studies through the Six Week Sleep Challenge tell us that almost 50% of Australians between 20 to 30 cannot go one week without using their smartphone in bed. Which could have something to do with the fact that trouble getting to sleep is more common amongst our under 30s than those over 30.
•  Naps are good.   No, this is not a drill. Several studies (including one from NASA and one from Harvard) have found that just a 20 to 30 minute nap increases our alertness and our productivity. The trick is to time your nap right. Not too short, because you need enough to feel a difference. Not too long because you don’t want to fall into a deep sleep that could mean you wake up feeling groggy. ‘Just right’ means about 20 to 30 minutes in the early afternoon or straight after lunch.

SLEEP & the 2T concept

It is easy to have a nap in the 2T reclined mode,    see ☛Early 2Tilt chair CONCEPT and criticism→ .  For privacy in a busy office it is possible to design a hood that can be pulled down.    This would be more universally adopted and much less expensive in both cost and space. than a dedicated system. With the advent of AI and robotics offices will be geared to the emotional and physiological requirements of the highly paid staff.   2 Tilt chairs and their 4M derivatives will be exactly relevant.

Return to  MANAGERS on OFFICE HEALTH→