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Until recently, you could decorate your place with Modernist furniture--stuff designed in the 1920s on--and still use it for anything you had to do: eat meals, read books, watch TV. Although items like the Wassily and Barcelona chairs were designed well before television, they were suited for any kind of sit-down purpose you had between the 1920s and the current century.
But now more and more of us are surfing the web, and not at our desks with tower machines; we're lounging around with laptops. As there isn't really much furniture designed for this purpose, designer Manual Saez is taking up the slack with this Daybed, intended specifically for internet surfing.
What do you guys think, do we need dedicated furniture for this activity? Has Saez fired an early shot in what will be a long campaign, or do you think this is just a passing fad?
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Comments
We may not need purpose-designed chairs, but we DO need a category of desk surfaces and chairs that acknowledge this. My biggest problem, as a woman just below the average height for women, is that tables designed for eating at are too high (relative to chairs) to comfortably type at. Desks are designed to support monitors and sometimes they toss in a keyboard tray. A good desk for laptop use really needs to be at (or just slightly above) the height that is now accorded to keyboard trays, and the tilt would be nice. Integrated power... whatever, power strips are cheap.
Furniture like this is unnecessary. Companies like belkin have already made products to make using laptops in any chair more comfortable (avoid getting burns on your lap). I just need something to make it easier to use my laptop while sitting cross-legged on a couch.
I think that creating furniture to solve the problem of how to make electronics use more comfortable is dodging the problem and creating needless products in order to solve for how the electronics themselves are not designed to be easily used. Items such as laptops should be designed not just by interaction designers, but also designers with concern for how the device will be used physically, instead of just within the context of the interface.