The office chair that's begging you to take a break (featured on NPR's TED Radio Hour)

Interaction Design, Ergonomics

2022 - 2023

Product Designer

The Balance Chair

We spend way too much time sitting—and it’s hurting our health and creativity. During the pandemic, the average workday got 50 minutes longer, and many remote workers found themselves sitting for over 6.5 hours straight as the boundaries between workplace and home blurred.

I was one of them—an “active couch potato” who exercised daily but rarely stood up while working. So I designed the Balance Chair: a seat that uses a linear actuator to gently force you to stand after a set period, helping you build more movement into your day.

This project made me consider whether the ubiquitous chair should always afford sitting, whether something built for resting could also promote standing, and what it would be like for a chair to help you in achieving your health habits. Our digital lives keep us constantly connected, but maybe our chairs should remind us to pause and connect with ourselves and our needs.

I learned so much in this project from the power of looking beyond your immediate context to immediate and analogous problems, how to say no to the things you could do to do one thing very well, to the importance of storytelling, because a thing will not sell itself.

Special thanks to Daniel Jonas, my woodworking teacher!

Problem

Like many during the Pandemic, I was much less active and tied to my desk working longer hours, which hurt me physically and mentally.

Solution

I designed the Balance Chair, which tilts you out of your seat on a customizable time interval so you can add more movement to your work day.

Focus Areas

Health/wellness, Physical products

Press

NPR's TED Radio Hour "Body Electric" podcast

My project was mentioned on NPR TED Radio Hour's "Body Electric" podcast, which discusses the changes to our bodies in the Information Age.

The making of the Balance Chair: from UXR to prototyping with farm equipment

I surveyed people in one of the fittest, most remote-working cities in the U.S. and found that active people often had external triggers—like pets or meetings—to stand up, while sedentary people lacked those interruptions. This insight inspired me to create the Balance Chair: a seat that physically prompts movement for those who don’t get natural breaks. I began questioning whether a chair should only afford sitting. What if it encouraged standing and rest instead? Even without an electronics background, I built a working prototype using parts from chicken coop door systems.

Reflections

After a one usability test with the Balance Chair—just two hours a day over two days—the results spoke volumes. While I found the Balance Chair helpful in getting movement and feeling better, an associate-level lawyer who tested it had particularly telling results: fewer breaks, more time standing, and more than triple the break time compared to a standard office chair. Despite taking longer breaks, he still completed nearly all the work he expected to—showing the Balance Chair might just help you feel better and work smarter. Of course an N of one is not sufficient to make any definitive determinations of effectiveness, but I'd like to do more testing with more time.

I learned new skills like laser cutting, woodworking and electronics

I had never built something like this from scratch before, and getting the Balance Chair to physically move required problem-solving across disciplines. It was equal parts prototyping, debugging, and sanding.

Finding a legitimate lead for an auditing project can be exceptionally difficult and time consuming translating to higher labor costs

This is often due to massive volumes of transactions and siloed data storage that requires users' continuous, manual and exhausting data processing and reconciliation. A majority of users at this agency relied on more seasoned data analysts for support for assistance with this data synthesis with otherwise straightforward data. Relying on these more experienced data analysts decreased their bandwidth, which could be used for more complex data analysis.

In this version, if a single contractor receives over $1,000,000 for any individual recipient in a month, then a watch report is generated.  In user research and from audit reports, this doesn’t align with users’ mental models and could risk adoption of our MVP.

In this version, if a single state receives over $1,000,000 for any individual ineligible recipient in a month, then a watch report is generated.

This aligns with how users select audit reports currently and does not require them to manually filter and calculate total transactions paid across multiple contractors. It’s already aggregated to the level which they care about for selecting an audit topic.

In this version, if a single state receives over $1,000,000 for any individual ineligible recipient in a month, then a watch report is generated.     

The results

Usability testing (2 hrs/day over 2 days) showed that while using the Balance Chair one user, a busy lawyer, worked just as effectively with less pain and longer breaks.

Number of breaks from work user took

2 breaks

3 breaks

Number of times the user stood up

5 times

2 times

Cumulative session break time

13 minutes

4 minutes

Amount of actual completed vs. expected completed work

I completed most of the work I expected to

Level of neck/back pain after the session

Not at all painful

Somewhat painful

Level of eye pain after the session

Not very painful

Somewhat painful

Level of head aches after the session

Not at all painful

Somewhat painful

Have any questions?

Reach out

Finding a legitimate lead for an auditing project can be exceptionally difficult and time consuming translating to higher labor costs

In this version, if a single contractor receives over $1,000,000 for any individual recipient in a month, then a watch report is generated. In user research and from audit reports, this doesn’t align with users’ mental models and could risk adoption of our MVP.

In this version, if a single state receives over $1,000,000 for any individual ineligible recipient in a month, then a watch report is generated.     