Novague: An Armchair Like a Power Plant

(jiří macek) The young Czech design studio of Novague, led by industrial designer Petr Novák, has found a way of using unexploited energy. They have designed a rocking chair that combines relaxation with producing electricity.

Petr Novák, who worked as a designer on the Škoda Auto team in the past and has designed several vehicle studies, including the concept of a mono-car and a racing motorbike, dislikes both waiting and wasting time. For this reason, he and his colleagues have installed a miniature generator onto a futuristically shaped armchair. By means of a simple conversion of rocking into the motion of a piston, one can read by a LED lamp that shines simply thanks to his/her rocking or recharge his/her cellular.

The Move Your Energy armchair was presented at the Green Gadgets competition, organized as part of the homonymous New York conference that focuses on discovering new technologies for electricity-production and inventions in the field of energy-saving and waste recycling. The rocking chair by the Prague-based Novague studio took 8th place among all ecological projects when the committee selected its 50 semi-finalists. Thus, it has gained an opportunity to participate in a renowned design festival with ecological themes – Transclimatic in the Australian city of Sydney.

“The concept of the Move Your Energy chair seeks to arouse a public debate about how to maintain energetic self-sufficiency in the future and how energy could be saved if people made it themselves – even in an unforced way when loitering in a rocking chair,” explains Novák in a press release. I started to imagine how generators gradually permeate all our movements - I really like this idea. It would be great, if we could manage to utilize the energy put out by millions of sportspeople in gyms every day. Biking simulators, running belts, and ground rowboats would suffice to light the gyms, if not their surroundings. I would be able to rock again in a conservative way. That would be wonderful.

www.novague.com

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