To design furniture and interiors for more playful and body-minded lifestyles. Or in other words: to make life more boing!
As an antidote for sedentary lives, with an emphasis on the dote, anydote!
Not for the digital-nomads, but for the digital-”kinets”. Where digital nomads are not bound by location and use this extra freedom to travel the globe, digital “kinets” are not bound by the strain of physical labor and use this freedom to pursue environments and activities that are physically stimulating and challenging, giving them the best of both worlds (or an essential refuge).
ERGONOMICS
Let’s be clear about ergonomics as a solution for reducing musculoskeletal disorders (MSD’s) and physical/mental fatigue from sedentary lifestyles and repetitive strain activities. Ergonomics is good for people’s health in the sense that it minimises the effects of what would otherwise be bad for people’s health, but it’s not healthy in itself!
Ergonomics help to mitigate some of the adverse health effects associated with repetitive strain and sedentarism (specifically MSD’s), but it is at best only half the solution and at its worst it helps to maintain the status quo of repetitive, sedentary modes of living and working, while drawing attention away from the root of the problem, namely: a chronic lack of joyful, physical activity.
For us boing is more than a word (or a sound!), it’s a philosophy. Seriously! As goofy as it sounds, there is meaning in the word “boing” . Both from a real-world design-perspective and from a conceptual philosophic-perspective.
Let’s start with its philosophical meaning. What does boing mean conceptually? Defining it negatively, which is a bit of cheat to be fair, the word “boing” can be defined as: “the inverse of the word ‘Meta'”. [BUZZ WORD DETECTED!!!] The word Meta used to belong to jargon, specifically that of computer science, but meme-culture has handed it down to the masses and made it popular. Recently the mother company of Facebook even adopted it as its name, giving it an evil tech bro edge. But let’s try to ignore that connotation! Words are innocent! But it’s not as bad and evil as they make it seem, so please bear with me.
What does Meta mean and why is it relevant? Meta is a slippery word to define, but typically it means “of a higher order”. When something is referred to as being meta it means that it is in some way self-referential, for example: thinking about one’s thoughts, joking about a common type of joke, data specifying a type of data or a painting of a painting. It’s not In other words, meta is a kind of “aboutness”. Not the thing itself, but information about the thing.
Meta doesn’t mix with the real thing; it doesn’t touch them; it only observes them from a distance. To a meta-observer, the world is a hierarchy of different levels that are each distinct and irreducible.
boing is the inverse of meta in the sense that boing sees that the different levels of the hierarchy are strikingly similar to each other in their behavior. In fact, talking about them in terms of “levels” is already too meta. They are rather structures in a nested sequence that are fluid and familiar.
As an onomatopoeia, the word “boing” bridges the gap between human language and the more-than-human world. In fact, what boing reveals is that there is no gap to begin with…
boing?
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