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Luigi Colani's typewriter stations (2021) (writingball.blogspot.com)
43 points by rbanffy on Jan 6, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


I like it, although the design needs updating from an ergonomic perspective (keyboard should be lowered and a palm/forearm rest should be integrated with the chair.)

The self-contained aspect is very appealing for a home office setup, and it would interesting to see how these could be moved around an office by robots or placed in the back of a rickshaw.


I have a Colani mouse in a box somewhere. Looked cool, ergonomics meh.

http://www.tcocd.de/Pictures/Peripheral/Sicos/colanimouse.sh...

His car and truck designs are much more ambitious. Might post that link as a thread.

http://www.bubblemania.fr/en/luigi-colani-inventeur-bio-desi...


Here in Germany, Colani and his designs were often featured in magazine articles, and he definitely was a bit of a design celebrity. Even when I was still a kid, I realized that his stuff looked very cool and futuristic, but was usually extremely, almost comically unusable. Strangely, he was celebrated as an eccentric genius anyway.


The Vobis Colani series "Highscreen" PCs were some of the ugliest pieces of hardware you could buy IMHO :).


For reference: Tower [1] and desktop [2] cases.

[1] https://hozi.net/it/computer-historie/vobis-highscreen-colan... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Colani-pc.jpg

IIRC, he presented a prototype that was much more radical, and a lot got lost in mass production. In the end it was a standard case with a few rounded edges.


Well, a PC case that needs to accommodate quite a few different standardized drives that must be accessible from the outside isn't really an ideal case [no pun intended] for an extravagant design approach. Apple did a much better job at that with the iMac and G3/G4/G5 tower designs by hiding the drives behind flaps or custom faceplates.



Honestly looking at the photos linked by tcmb, they're not even close to the ugliest PC cases you could buy.




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