A lot of concepts never really make it off the ground, but the Take a Seat Chair, a chair which follows a person around a library could just have the right stuff. The way it works is that you swipe your library card on the square on the front of the chair. Once that has been done, the chair will go where you do; the magic courtesy of an RFID chip. Dutch designer Jelte van Geest created them for the Openbare Bibliotheek Endhoven Library Design project.

I like this idea for a number of reasons. One, it provides flexible seating arrangements in libraries. If you are doing a big research project, you might want to browse through books at your shelves. There can be a lot of walking involved in a large library; kilometers of it in fact and it isn’t practical to carry a chair and a big pile of books. It has the potential to make a library a much more comfortable place.

For the management, there is the capability of moving multiple chairs at once. This would make life dramatically easier when setting up seating areas; thereby eliminating unnecessary exercise.

I’ve got to say, I love the way this guy thinks. [technabob]