Throw your standing desk in the trash. Sitting, not standing, might be the best way for the 9-to-5 office drone to stay active, as long as they're willing to strap themselves into the Dynamic Chair--an exoskeleton-like chair that turns a sitter's entire body into a computer mouse.
Designed by Dutch design student Govert Flint, the Dynamic Chair works by translating the movements of a sitter into a signal that a computer can understand. By strapping yourself into the Dynamic Chair's padded steel frame, you can move your mouse cursor across the screen by twisting your torso up, down, left or right. Kicking your legs clicks the mouse. That all sounds like a pretty simple hack, but it's enough to turn browsing Reddit into a CrossFit workout, and to turn your average workday into a full-on marathon.
"The truth is that our modern lives are so busy and inactive, we have to go the gym in our free time just to move our bodies enough to maintain our health," Flint tells me. The Dynamic Chair was born, Flint says, with a desire to marry our sedentary digital work lives with the robust activity that workers used to be able to take for granted.
Currently, Flint is looking for manufacturing partners to develop the Dynamic Chair into a full retail product, as well as software developers to help make certain mouse-heavy tasks (like graphics and music editing) less exhausting for users. But according to the Dutch designer, the Dynamic Chair is only one part of a proposed solution that would see the full suite of office accessories replaced with more physically active alternatives. And what would a Dynamic Keyboard look like? A QWERTY dance pad, perhaps.
The Dynamic Chair will be on display as part of Dutch Design Week from October 18 to 26.
[h/t Dezeen]