Operation Hackbutt
If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in San Francisco September 25-26. Unfortunately, I had to bow out in the wee hours due to illness.
What you may not know is that my seating was sponsored. I was the guy with the comfy chairs. Not one, but two.
You see, the chairs that are provided at events like this are designed for stacking, not for sitting. Sit in those things long enough, and pretty soon all you can really think about is how much it sucks to be sitting in them. I felt like my performance in May’s TechCrunch Hackathon was really impacted by how shitty the chairs were.
I got to thinking a week or so before the San Francisco event that it would really be a true test of “chairs designed for long periods of sitting,” if I were able to get my hands on one. So began what my co-workers at Mashery dubbed … Operation #Hackbutt.
I told my sob story on Twitter to both @Steelcase and @hermanmiller in hopes of inspiring one of them to provide me with a top-of-the-line ergonomic chair. Something that they could say “yes, hackers of the world, this is what you should dream of sitting on” with, to a room full of 300+ hackers. After all, we sit for a living, do we not?
To my surprise and delight, both Steelcase and Herman Miller responded to my plea. With less than 48 hours before the event began, I had commitments from both companies to provide me with a chair. How awesome was that? So awesome.
The Cockpit
The Steelcase contender: The Cockpit. Also known as the Leap chair, with The Leather and The Chrome. I was already familiar with this chair, since we have many of the fabric and not-chrome flavors of Leap at the Mashery World Headquarters.
There’s no question that Leap is a great chair. I’ve spent the better part of three years sitting in the fabric and not-chrome version. However, I can now attest to the fact that The Leather and The Chrome make a big difference. It’s not just about how it looks, but about how it feels. The dude working the floor at the Steelcase showroom in San Francisco where I picked up the chair called it “The Cockpit,” and he’s right on the money. It’s very easy to forget the chair entirely when you’re sitting in it — it’s just an extension of your body.
The bad news: with The Leather and The Chrome, Leap is around $1,200 a pop. A great chair, no doubt.
The Exoskeleton
Herman Miller’s Embody chair is like getting into one of those bad-ass killing machines featured in Avatar. I could feel my vertebrae separating as it supported parts of my upper back that I’m not used to feeling in regard to a chair the first time I sat in it.
It’s got a wide seat for all kinds of butts, and the way the back gets narrow towards the top allows for a broader range of backward motion for your elbows … which you don’t really think about until you’re in a chair that allows for it. It was a unique sitting experience, and definitely one that earned me a lot of jealous looks from fellow hackers. The downside: list price for this puppy is a whopping $1,700. Good luck getting your boss to spring for that.
Conclusion
Both chairs were excellent. I swapped between them throughout the event. I was there just over 14 hours, so I had plenty of time to sit in both chairs. After midnight, fellow hackers were asking for turns in each chair, just to have a few minutes of a break from the craptastic chairs they’d been sitting in.
I’d recommend either one. If I could afford it, I’d probably go for the Embody, simply to try to recreate that lifting sensation I got in my spine when I first tried it out. But after spending years in a Leap, I can also say you can’t go wrong with that chair.
Take it from me: a high-quality chair truly can make a difference in the quality of output. Many thanks to @Steelcase and @hermanmiller for making Operation Hackbutt a success! That in itself was just cool.