How Not to Design a Chair

For someone who sits at a computer for extended periods of time, your chair is rather important. This especially true for designers, developers and copywriters. The trouble with a bad chair is that you can conduct a mindless amount of things from not sitting properly and this can usually be bought back to your chair.

I have a terrible chair. It wasn't particularly cheap and for someone who uses the same desk setup for an extended period of time it causes me quite a bit of pain. Like when I bought myself a proper monitor and keyboard for my laptop though, it's often left to one of the last things to be considered.

I have a rather nice setup, my monitor is large and at the appropriate height, my keyboard suits me reasonably well (although, not so much for my right hand) and my desk is at a good height.

The problem I often face however is upper back pain, pain in my wrists and neck pain. When it is all added up, it's not so nice and could in the future cause me some serious problems.

The main thing I can put this down to is my chair. It is not that adjustable, is quite hard, generally poorly designed and not high enough for me.

The biggest problem is the arm rests. The arm rests, for some insane reason hold the back to the base of the chair. This means that I cannot remove them without having a stool. This also means that the back is impossible to slouch in.

For some, this may seem as an advantage, if you can't slouch, you won't slouch, right?

That poses the inherent problem, instead of absorbing yourself into the chair, you move against the chair and slouch "inside" the chair, sitting your back at a very poor angle.

This is where I put my upper back pain into. By not sitting on my chair properly I bend my back making it hurt.

A couple of years ago, and still now it seems, desks came with keyboard compartments. This would allow you to fit a reasonable size CRT monitor on your desk and still be able to fit a keyboard there. Of course, with the mainstream use of LCD/TFT displays, there is now enough room on the desktop itself allowing you instead to fit it there.

This does of course make the compartment useless. For me, it's in the way. When I am sat properly at my desk, my knees hit this and stop me from properly allowing my legs to stretch out. In some ways, I can put this down to why I don't sit at my desk properly, because it's uncomfortable to sit properly.

So what is the moral of this post? Get a decent chair.

In the future you will save hours and hours of time spent moaning about it, you will get more work done, and you won't end up being in pain when it's really not good to be. As a freelancer, you can spend more time getting projects done, than recovering from back pain and whilst you shouldn't really spend hours upon hours in the same position, you will be able to be in a good "position" to get what you intended, done.