¶ virtual monday, pleasurable office chairs Posted 21 years, 11 months ago on February 18, 2004
Yesterday (Tuesday), was a Virtual Monday. Virtual Monday means that even though it's a Tuesday, we have all of our Monday classes and the Institute operates as if it's actually a Monday. The idea is that we want to have most of our holidays on Mondays cause it makes for better weekends and more uniformity, but we don't want to screw over the courses that have class on Monday. So on the Tuesdays following every other Monday holiday, we have a Virtual Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Institute returns to its normal schedule.

in other news, I was just browsing through the archives of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library, and happened across the proceedings of a conference titled DPPI: Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces. Of course I had to take a look. So I look and see that the second abstract in last year's proceedings came from some researchers in the Netherlands. It's titled: "Measuring the emotions elicited by office chairs"¹ At this point I'm just ready to fall over laughing. But I think maybe it's just a hokey title and they're actually presenting some interesting research, so I read the abstract. And I quote:

Office chair designers have traditionally focused their design efforts on optimizing the so-called 'ergonomic fit.' Although the effort to design chairs that support physical comfort is commendable, the focus on ergonomics neglects the possible impact of emotional responses on the general experience of comfort. The general experience of comfort experienced when using a chair is not only influenced by the ergonomic fit but also by the 'emotional fit,' i.e. an emotional response that is desired by the user. In this paper, a study is reported that was designed to measure emotional responses evoked by office chair appearance. The study was part of a bigger project concerning attractive and comfortable office chairs. The emotional responses evoked by 15 chairs were measured with the Emocard method, a non-verbal self-report instrument. Some differences were found in the results obtained with the Emocards and those obtained with a standard verbal evaluation method. Although discriminative to some extent, the non-verbal method was found to be less discriminative than the verbal method. In the discussion section, some recommendations for the development of the Emocard method are reported. It is discussed that, given these feasible recommendations, the Emocard method can be a useful tool for office chair designers that want to 'design for an emotional fit'.

So in short, they took some office chairs, and this thing called an Emocard, and showed the chairs to a bunch of people. Then they wrote a paper on it and presented their findings in an ACM-sponsored conference called Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces.

Somebody shoot me now before I get farther into academia.

---

¹Karen Reijneveld, Michiel de Looze, Frank Krause, Pieter Desmet. Designing Pleasurable Products And Interfaces. archive Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Designing pleasurable products and interfaces, Pages: 6 - 10

---

---

Comments disabled until the spammers go away. I hope you comment spammers all die horrible deaths and are forced to delete endless streams of comment spam in your days in purgatory.