Everyday Design Successes #3 — Interlocking Chairs
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An unintended benefit of attending this Monday’s Distinguished Lecture Series was finding these chairs, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve seen before. What struck me as special was their interlocking design, which I believe may solve one issue of chairs without complicating another.
The past few posts in this series, though I didn’t realize it at the time, were examples of excellence in Interaction Design (IxD). Though I also didn’t realize it, some of the classic principles in DOET — affordances, constraints, mapping — are really mostly applicable to IxD, but not other types of design, like systems design, graphic design, or interior design. While each of these other types of design can have interplay with interactive elements, it doesn’t seem to make as much sense to consider them within a framework of principles that describe IxD. I don’t have a handy framework for considering the design of these chairs — nor am I entirely sure what type of design goes into these chairs (I’m thinking industrial). Thus, I will just examine them relative to other chairs I know, and the various functions chairs are usually involved in, bringing in some examples from my own work experience.
This is the interlocking metalwork between two chairs:
The chairs are joined by a taller, relatively vertical metal piece on the left leg (next picture), and a shorter, more horizontal piece on the right leg (the picture after).
For context, I worked at a country club this past summer, where I split my time between being a receptionist and setting up events around the two buildings we had. Many of the setups called for rows of chairs that had to be manually spaced by workers, which isn’t too hard on a small scale, but can be seriously challenging if row size gets up to huge numbers, like 50+. Someone who leaves one more inch between chairs is now looking at a 4ft difference in the size of rows, which can block half of what was supposed to be an aisle. It’s unlikely to have this large of a systematic error, but the point is that people aren’t perfect at “eyeballing” stuff, as anyone who has ever tried to set up cones to represent an outdoor sports field would know. It’s hard to get right, which is what I appreciate most about these chairs. The single, clearest upside of this design is that it prescribes an exact distance between chairs, and guarantees that each is oriented the same way as every other chair in its row. This is what caught my attention in the first place — this seemed like a great concept to me. As you can see in the last photo above, there is also about a ~6in distance between the plastic backs of each chair, which also mandates a personal space zone, another important aspect of chairs. Having legs wider than the body of a chair also serves to help chairs stack. I didn’t try stacking these chairs because it would have been inappropriate at the time, but I don’t imagine they can stack as well as four-legged chairs, which are surprisingly satisfying to stack. Stacking is one of the other industrial parameters that seems important to me, but like I said, I don’t have any data on how these chairs stack, so I can’t touch on it here.
Besides these industrial parameters, I suppose there are interactive elements between users and chairs, but that’s not the part of these chairs that caught my eye. There is likely some amount of objectivity in the form of some designs/materials being better or worse for back support, but otherwise I believe that most of how users feel about sitting in chairs is really personal preference. The reality is again that designs are the product of competing goals, and plastic is not usually something chosen to maximize comfort or luxury, it’s something that minimizes price. I don’t think these chairs are winning any awards in the comfort department, but they don’t need to.
In thinking of potential downsides to this design, and all that comes to mind is the inability to arrange chairs in an arc or other non-linear pattern. However, on second thought, you can literally just choose to not link the chairs and leave them next to each other. The only possible issue is having a large minimum gap due to the wide legs and metalwork.
Speculation aside, I think the simple design of the chair is effective at tackling one particular problem faced by event-purpose chairs, so I wanted to honor it with a post in this series. For close followers of the blog, you’ll notice I didn’t post last Friday for the UX Speaker Series — it was cancelled, with the speaker out sick. There is a relative lull in extracurricular HCDE event listings in the upcoming weeks, so I may take the time to explore new territory on the blog. I am currently waiting and hoping that last week’s DUB seminar will be posted to their Vimeo page soon. My next post will be my Ideation deliverable, uploaded either tomorrow or Wednesday.
