Toyota's Crab Chair Is Engineering Inspiration Porn
Nobody Asked for a Crab Chair
Toyota's "Walk me" prototype replaces wheels with four articulating legs, using LiDAR and sensors to climb stairs and navigate uneven terrain. While the crab-like chair drew attention at the Japan Mobility Show, this disabled writer argues such over-designed, cost-prohibitive concepts are "engineering inspiration porn" that pull talent and money away from practical solutions like lightweight power chairs and accessible shower chairs.
These kinds of prototypes are built to inspire and show what is possible, not to be mass produced for actual users.
- sho
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".
- wincy
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?
- drbscl
>Let’s be clear: if I could have a free crabchair tomorrow, I’d be out the door, in the line to pick up my new robot legs before I knew where to go.
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
- gwbas1c
> 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.
- palmotea
Why do so many of the demo videos of this crab chair show no people sitting on it? Is it not for sitting?