[Update: James Ludwig, Steelcase’s chief designer, has sent us some intriguing information on pricing and demand, added to the bottom of this post]
IDEO and Steelcase have just announced what might be a revolution in classroom design, a school desk that seamlessly adapts to whatever happens in class.
If you’ve spent any time in a schoolroom in the last 15 years, you’re familiar with the high pitched whine of metal scraping against linoleum, as students rearrange their chairs and desks to whatever activity is going on. It seems like a minor annoyance, but it’s a serious design problem: School furniture was largely designed 50 years ago for static, face-forward teaching. It isn’t suited to the myriad forms of teaching that take place in the modern classroom.
Contrast that with the Node chair, which was designed by IDEO and produced by Steelcase, a Michigan-based furniture company. The details betray a remarkable thoughtfulness: The seat is a
generously sized bucket, so that students can shift around and adapt
their posture to whatever’s going on; the seat also swivels, so that
students can, for example, swing around to look at other students making
class presentations; and a rolling base allows the chair to move
quickly between lecture-based seating and group activities.
In group activities, the proportions are such that the chairs and integrated desktops combine into something like a conference table:
