Alcyone Standing Chair

After having had some health issues from sitting and working long hours at the office for many years, I wanted to design a product that would help me stand and work in an office while keeping my other body parts such as legs, hips, glute and upper body engaged at the same time. That health incidence in spite of being fairly active after hours and on weekends made me realize the importance of making a fundamental change to the way I work and exercise in order to prevent further damage to my health. And this started with evaluating the way I worked in terms of body anatomy and focusing on three things; maintaining a good posture throughout the day, keep moving as much as possible while working and to take a break often to do a quick workout assisted by a product I could design myself. With the backrest attached to the seat which follows the shape of natural arch of spine, keeping a good posture becomes easier as it prevents slumping forward and making the seat move vertically and sideways would allow body parts to keep moving as well. In order to engage in a bit more vigorous movement, I wanted to use this product as a chair/ exercise equipment with which I could perform sit and stand movement while seated, do hip twisting sideways to stretch hip flexor muscles and do a backward stretch by raising both arms over the backrest. Anyone could perform all of these exercises quickly and discreetly while working in the office or at home.

My plan is to build a prototype whether through industries and manufactures interested in financing and fabricating the product or through local fabrication shops I can work with directly. Production of parts will have to be relegated to several different shops and plants specializing in production of specific components. After the prototype is built, my hope is to have it tested and evaluated by different groups of people for a few months to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the design, to improve it and to promote it through advertisement, exhibition and/ or social media.

This was a completely self-initiated project which took approximately two and a half years working part time in my own studio, and can be split into first and second phases. The first was an investigational phase and involved doing series of sketches, building scale models and a full scale mock-up and getting feedbacks from my colleagues. This is the period when I produced perhaps the largest amount of sketches, models and photographs to document manual fabrication processes for future reference. The second phase was more specific and concentrated on the current design that took about a year to the time I nominated my design to this competition.

As you adjust the height of the seat component manually, vertical cables (2) attached to the seat with flexible prongs bend and stretch inward and outward slightly and by using this stress and friction between cables and conduits (4) attached to the stainless steel base frame, the seat is “suspended” at a precise height location that a user adjusts to. The threaded locks on the conduits assure that the seat will be secured and will not move. This is one of the main features of this product that I discovered as I was working with the scale model which was an indispensable tool not only for testing many ideas I had but also for rendering three dimensional computer model that allowed me to see the product from multiple angles. Because of the complexity of design and specialized equipment and resources needed, the final working prototype was never built to this date.

Even though I have been conscious of leading healthy lifestyle generally, I was contradicting myself when I found myself emulating bad workplace habits from my coworkers over the years. These included sitting all day in office, not getting up enough to stretch and exercise, developing lower back pain that resulted in medical treatments, etc. At the beginning of design process, I connected with my extensive experience in building architectural and exhibit design models using a variety of fabrication materials and wanted to see if I could experiment and come up with an innovative office chair design that would alleviate some of the health problems I was having. I started by selecting flexible materials such as steel cable, stainless steel, elastic cords, injection moulding materials and high-density foam that I had a lot of experience working on models but had little experience building full-scale prototype pieces with. My goal then was to combine my interest in addressing workplace health issues and designing everyday furniture piece that is functional, mechanically sturdy and aesthetically pleasing.

It was important to me that an individual user attain the ownership of this product and to feel comfortable using it to achieve the desired sitting position. The memory foam (SAF’s) attached to the seat shell with Dual Lock and elastic horizontal ropes of the backrest achieve this personalized experience. I also wanted users to be able to both “lean” lightly on the standing chair and to “sit” as if sitting in the conventional chair and thick memory foam attached to the concave shape of the seat shell achieves this purpose. Since everyone’s fitness and physical tolerance level is different, this chair along with height adjustable desks would be introduced as an alternative to the conventional workspace that can be used and shared with those who are simply interested in improving and maintaining overall good health.