IDEO and Steelcase have just announced what might be a revolution in classroom design, a schooldesk that seamlessly adapts to whatever happens in class.

If you've spent any time in a schoolroom in the last 15 years, you're familiar with the high pitched whine of metal scraping against linoleum, as students rearrange their chairs and desks to whatever activity is going on. It seems like a minor annoyance, but it's a serious design problem: School furniture was largely designed 50 years ago for static, face-forward teaching. It isn't suited to the myriad forms of teaching that take place in the modern classroom.

Contrast that with the Node chair, which was designed by IDEO and produced by Steelcase, a Michigan-based furniture company. The details betray a remarkable thoughtfulness: The seat is a generously sized bucket, so that students can shift around and adapt their posture to whatever's going on; the seat also swivels, so that students can, for example, swing around to look at other students making class presentations; and a rolling base allows the chair to move quickly between lecture-based seating and group activities.

In group activities, the proportions are such that the chairs and integrated desktops combine into something like a conference table:

And finally, there's storage underneath the seat--but off the ground--for backpacks, while the armrests themselves have a subtle flair that allows them to become strong, convenient hooks:

Of course, it's unlikely that the chair will be appearing in your local public school anytime soon--the market seems to be the glizty new secondary schools and new university classrooms popping into existance. And you wonder whether the economics will work out, since a plastic chair probably can't last as long as bomb-proof metal job like you find in public schools.

Meaning this design, for now, will be one more reason to envy a private-school education. 

For more pictures, check out The Contemporist.

Regardless of whether climate change is real, man-made, or happening at an accelerated rate, there's no harm in preparing for the worst. In Climate Change Adaptation in New York City, a new report from the New York City Panel on Climate Change, a motley crew of scientists, government officials and legal, risk management, and insurance experts plan out the city's attempt to survive in the face of climate change.

The NYCPCC's portrait of a climate change-ravaged New York City is disturbing, but not all that surprising. The report describes intense heat waves, increased blackouts, flooding in low-lying neighborhoods, severe droughts, reduced water quality, all wrapped up a climate that resembles that of Raleigh, North Carolina, or Norfolk, Virginia, today. But how can such a densely-packed city possibly prepare for this?

The report is fairly optimistic about New York City's climate change-combating resources, but it explains that adaptation will require cooperation between a number of different factions, including designers, the insurance industry, local government, and more. The report suggests, among other things, that NYC:

• Create a mandate for an ongoing body of experts that provides advice for the City of New York. Areas that could be addressed by experts in the future include regular updates to climate change projections, improved mapping and geographic data, and periodic assessments of climate change impacts and adaptation for New York City to inform a broad spectrum of climate change adaptation policies and programs.
• Establish a climate change monitoring program to track and analyze key climate change factors, impacts and adaptation and evolving-knowledge indicators in New York City, as well as to study relevant advances in research on related topics. This involves creating a network of monitoring systems and organizations and a region-wide indicator database for analysis.
•  Include multiple layers of government and a wide range of public and private stakeholder experts to build buy-in and crucial partnerships for coordinated adaptation strategies. Take account of the private sector in these interactions.
•  Conduct a review of standards and codes, to evaluate their revision to meet climate challenges, or the development of new codes and regulations that increase the city's resilience to climate change. Develop design standards, specifications, and regulations that take climate change into account, and hence are prospective in nature rather than retrospective.
•  Work with the insurance industry to facilitate the use of risk-sharing mechanisms to address climate change impacts.

Whether New York City can put such a comprehensive plan into action in time to make a difference depends on how seriously the city takes the threat of climate change. The NYCPCC's report is a start. Now the next step is get the city's diverse residents to work together. And if New York can do it, any city can.

 

[Climate Change Adaptation in New York City]