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Sidetrack Table Reminds Lazy Bloggers to Occasionally Get Out of Bed

by Matthew Zuras on May 2, 2010 at 11:00 AM

Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design students Jennifer Kay, Jacek Barcikowski and Martina Pagura are concerned that people who work from home (such as yours truly) aren't getting enough stimulation throughout the day. In response, the students came up with a prototype for the Sidetrack table, a piece of dynamic furniture that's supposed to encourage breaks between spreadsheets -- or blog posts, as it were.

In an office environment, your boss might call this kind of behavior "meandering," or something even more colorful. But for stay-at-home workers, stretching the old legs is considered healthy, staving off the telecommuting cabin fever that makes Jack a dull boy. Sidetrack uses a tetrahedron-shaped "presence sensor" to analyze your activity and relay information back to the table itself, a sort of turntable-cum-polygraph. We're not really sure exactly what the Sidetrack's pen is plotting, or on what scale. If it's just measuring movement, then you can take a look at each of the squiggly deviations in the graph and congratulate yourself for not being entirely vegetative.

We have to admit that the concept itself is rather neat-looking, even if it is more of a thought experiment than a marketable product. Sadly, though, it follows the tradition of many infographics of late, in which the presentation of the information it tracks is a hell of a lot more interesting than the data itself. However, ladies (and gent), should you want an apt test market, you know where to find us. [From: Core77]


Tags: concept, copenhagen institute of interaction design, CopenhagenInstituteOfInteractionDesign, design, graphing, Motion sensing, MotionSensing, productivity, sidetrack, top

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