#HTE

Alternative Furniture Design: The Study Cube

One of the heartbreaking things about visiting South Korea is seeing that most children, including very young ones, wear eyeglasses. Years ago my cousin (a native) told me it’s because kids there put in long hours studying, practically from infancy, and that the constant exposure to desktop fluorescents ruins eyesight from a young age.

That may or may not be apocryphal, but there’s no doubt that parents there are obsessed with having their children study. So perhaps it’s not surprising that a South Korean company is selling this piece of furniture, the Study Cube:

The phone-booth-like enclosure features a hinged door with a window, a desk surface that’s tiny by American standards but par for the course in space-tight Korea, overhead shelving, and brightness-adjustable LED lighting.

The first question you probably have is why, in a country not known for their spacious apartments, would anyone buy this bulky item rather than a regular desk and chair? Here are my guesses:

1. Privacy. This raises interesting questions about how physical constructs do or don’t confer a sense of privacy. Think about office cubicles, or the hanging sheet you used to divide your college dorm/apartment. And in a domestic situation where there aren’t enough rooms, having a way to limit the light in a room might be beneficial when one person is studying and another is sleeping.

2. Focus. When you’re inside this tiny thing with no room on the desk for an Xbox, it seems clear that you’re only in there to do one thing.

Responses to the Study Cube on South Korean social media have ranged from “I want one” to WTF to outright disdain; one poster suggested that parents in Seoul’s Gangnam district would purchase these, have a lock installed on the door, and lock their children inside to force them to study. (Gangnam is not only the Beverly-Hills-like enclave popularized in Psy’s Gangnam Style music video, but is also the unofficial education capital of South Korea, allegedly producing some of the nation’s top students.)

That last ridiculous (I hope) suggestion aside: For those of you that aren’t claustrophobic, would sitting inside something like this help you to focus on the task at hand? I can’t decide if I would feel confined, or actually lose myself in the work.