It’s after 4 p.m. and I’m sitting in a modified Trance: feet crossed under my legs, chin resting on my left fist, scrolling with my right hand. That’s one of the nine new postures invented by our increasing use of laptops, tablets, and smartphones in the workplace.
Until recently, our computers have been bulky and stationary; everything else, human included, has been relatively flexible, The Atlantic describes.
Realizing that its products must adapt to this new mobile-enabled workspace, office furniture maker Steelcase conducted a study of how 2,000 office workers across 11 countries arrange their bodies and shift between different devices during the day.
They concluded that the way we compute changes the way we sit. And we are in pain.
"What we noticed," Steelcase’s James Ludwig says in this video, "was these new technologies, this new breed of devices -- and the new sociology we were seeing at work -- had driven nine new postures that we had never seen before."
Most of these postures require different support for your neck, shoulders, back, arms, and even your legs. The solution Steelcase came up with is a new chair that takes design cues from all nine postures. They named it the Gesture and it will retail for $780 to $880 this fall.
[Via The Atlantic, WSJ]
Image: Steelcase
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com