Looking at the design of the new Node chair, brought to mind three very different headline news articles:  1)  Our kids are spending more than 53 hours a week with electronic media — cellphones, iPods, video games and computers — that it might as well be a full-time job.  2)  Desktop sales fell by 23 percent last year across the computer industry, and in the U.S., 80 percent of sales went to notebooks.  Death of the PC? - Or is it more apropos to say rise of the notebooks?  3)  Handwriting is increasingly not being taught in many of today’s Elementary classrooms in a shift toward technologically literate students.  When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive, the rest— printed block letters.  

It only makes sense that when researching the needs of classroom seating for our new generation, Steelcase would totally reengineer the functionality of a classroom “chair.”  When studying the work habits in the modern student, as they put it, “We didn't go back to the drawing board.  We went back to school.”  Addressing issues of mobility, flexibility, handedness and appliances, the new Node chair not only also supports what students bring to class but also how they want to learn.  And if you envision that the way in which this generation learns is really not all that different than when you went to school, reread the first paragraph.
 

Recently we made a presentation to a local college who wanted seating to support their students in “in between” spaces.  Seating to support laptops, but the “traditional” (and I use that term loosely as this was a breakthrough concept just a few decades ago) tablet arm seating pieces simply wouldn’t do, why?  Because the small, handed tablet arms were designed for paper notebooks, not electronic ones.

The Node chair from Steelcase looks to be just in time to support the new generation of students in the classroom, the way they learn and more importantly what they use to do it.

  

 

In reinventing the traditional classroom chair, Steelcase didn't go back to the drawing board. They went back to school. They found classrooms that were static, allowing only for passive, one-way learning. Steelcase met educators with a desire to implement multiple pedagogies to support multiple learning styles. But today's classrooms are still unresponsive and unsupportive.

The node chair is mobile and flexible. It's designed for quick, easy transitions between one mode to the next. With node, a classroom can flex from a lecture-based mode to a team-based mode, and back again, without interruption.