I really dislike attitudes like the author's. I think it's great and important that people and companies spend considerable amounts of their time and money exploring the limits of design and what's possible, even if the concepts produced have little direct, practical use today. That kind of speculative R&D can lead to great things and who knows, maybe in 20 years it will lead to something amazing that will benefit a great deal of people.
Trying to pooh-pooh the ideas of tomorrow because they don't immediately solve all the problems of today is just terrible, short-sighted thinking.
And on a more pedantic note, obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all. What the author really means is "I didn't ask for a crab chair".
Agreed. Just goes to show that people have no idea how R&D works. You have to build the thing before you can discover if it's possible or not. If no one built stuff like this, you would never get improvements to your existing consumer-grade mobility devices. All breakthroughs look like longshots before they're real.
And a crab chair is a pretty good idea honestly. Sure wheels are cheaper and easier, but you can’t go many places with wheels. The crab chair could take you up normal stairs, lift you up to your bed, walk on sand or rough terrain.
What are they going on about? I showed this to my seven year old who is wheelchair bound and she asked me when she’s getting her robot legs. She’d absolutely love to have a crab leg chair that could get her up and down the stairs without having to transfer from her wheelchair to her stair lift. Move up and down a little so she could reach something out of a cabinet instead of having to ask big sister or mom and dad for help a hundred times a day.
You have to build proof of concepts before you can ever even think about mass producing any sort of product, I feel like that’s obvious?
> They’re over-designed, cost prohibitive and generally out of touch with the realities facing most would-be users. ... Unfortunately, they very rarely translate into real world benefits for people like us.
Shortly before the Solo Stove came onto the market, I met some of the inventors at Maker Fair in Menlo Park, CA. They were part of a group that was trying to engineer a low-smoke stove for indigenous women who spent most of their time cooking.
Instead, the women didn't use it but the men used it in the evening to stay warm.
I have a couple of Kelly Kettles (portable rocket-stoves), and one is for water and the other is for sand. The sand-filled one is a heat battery - charge it up after boiling some water with the other one, and bring it in the tent to keep things positively toasty.
Similar to "concept cars", these kind of things are never really made to be built. It's unfortunate if that sometimes takes attention away from actually making a better product.
“we should never try building new things because they get peoples hopes up” this is such a moronic attitude to have that seems more and more common. its the harrison bergeron-ification of the world
There is often a great big gap between what is available (meets basic requirements) and what is possible (crabchair). It is the space that is to boring for large companies to bother with.
Trying to pooh-pooh the ideas of tomorrow because they don't immediately solve all the problems of today is just terrible, short-sighted thinking.
And on a more pedantic note, obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all. What the author really means is "I didn't ask for a crab chair".
You have to build proof of concepts before you can ever even think about mass producing any sort of product, I feel like that’s obvious?
Shortly before the Solo Stove came onto the market, I met some of the inventors at Maker Fair in Menlo Park, CA. They were part of a group that was trying to engineer a low-smoke stove for indigenous women who spent most of their time cooking.
Instead, the women didn't use it but the men used it in the evening to stay warm.
So you're asking for a crab chair?
Jokes aside, yeah, it's expensive and likely impractical, but exploring the solution space is what this prototyping is for
His real gripe is that the bleeding edge prototype is too expensive.
There is often a great big gap between what is available (meets basic requirements) and what is possible (crabchair). It is the space that is to boring for large companies to bother with.
https://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/bizarre-robo...
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mechno-chair/Legends