The Last Shift Office Chair

Sitting in a coffin office chair while working for a 9-to-5 job. Maybe the right way to take extremely seriously your repetitious routine, to feel your existence slipping inexorably through your fingers. Or maybe just a perfect throne for a Zoom call to let everyone know just how your Monday is going.

The man behind The Last Shift Office Chair, as he called his project, is Chairbox, from UK, an original designer who tells “stories using consumer products.” The inspiration for this chair came to him when he was in his friend’s living room lying on the floor with his legs on the couch: “I thought that if I die in this pose,” he told Designboom, “they might have to bury me like that. It would be so inconvenient to put me in a coffin. They probably would need a special coffin in this case. I told my friend about it, and we laughed, but after a couple of weeks, I returned to that idea and explored it a bit more. Later, I made a 3D model in CAD software, rendered it, and posted online.”

The chair has nothing to do with Magritte’s The Balcony painting, as some have suggested. As Chairbox explains on his site, “there is a study that found out that sitting six to eight hours a day increases your chances of dying. By design, humans weren’t created to sit on chairs for eight hours a day.”

“Another issue is exploitation. While we spend most of our time at work most of us can’t afford some basic things. The gap between rich and poor is growing exponentially. What’s shocking is that it’s widely accepted by society, it became a norm that we spend our lives at work slowly killing ourselves and getting almost nothing out of it. The whole grind culture is just wrong, it feels to me like voluntary slavery.”

More on
iamchairbox.com