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".

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?

Companies aren’t going to want to interact with this demographic at all if this is the response to a cutting-edge tech demo.

> 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.

>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

The weird part is that the author actually does want a crab chair. He gushes about how awesome it would be.

His real gripe is that the bleeding edge prototype is too expensive.

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

Well nobody asked for this author’s opinion, yet here we are having to digest it.

Nobody asked for it because nobody knew a crab chair was an option! Now I don’t need my legs to get a coffee?? Sign me up.

One step closer to Wall-E.

It is also missing a foot rest.

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.

One crab chair, please!

Want

Low-key want.

I asked for a crab chair, and I'm not even disabled.

dang: can we change the link to an article not written by someone with an aggressively anti-hacker attitude?

https://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/bizarre-robo...

Now we can all ride around like Nute Gunray:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mechno-chair/Legends