The Complexity of Building a Lie-Down Workstation

For anyone that has built and tested their prototypes, the problem comes when you have a solution, but you realize it’s so clunky, so hard to use, or just finicky that you stop using that feature, and you keep refining to find a better way. In no way is this a comparison to the Altwork Station, which has ten years of development, five generations of prototypes, and three generations of production hardware, all adding up to 80,000 hours of design and engineering. Below I will share the development and testing we did to figure this out.First, let’s start with the final design. In this video, you can see how the aluminum arc extends and then retracts while the backrest reclines, resulting in zero need to adjust the headrest.This headrest moves to where it’s needed throughout recline. Let’s start with the second generation prototype (P2) because the first-gen hardly worked at all. Prototype 2We were focused on bigger problems at this stage of development, so there is no surprise that this design didn’t work. At this point, we had spent four years figuring working this out and here we were completely starting over, but it finally just all came together. Once we figured the actual pivot out, the only adjustments we needed were:Once we proved that it was the right concept, we widened and flattened the arc piece to decrease the wobble in the pivot feature and improve aesthetics.