Next Step for DRM: Our Furniture

Here’s a potential product idea for IKEA: a DRM chair. If you’re asking, “How on earth could a piece of furniture have DRM?”, I’d have to respond, “You need to think outside the box.” Imagine a chair, that after a certain number of sits, self-destructs. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but that doesn’t take away the awesomeness of it all.

The team behind the DRM chair might not have a name, but it’s comprised of nine people who sought out to create an interesting entry into “The Deconstruction“, a competition that encourages people to “re-think the world”. I do believe that this chair fits in nice with that.

While the video preview makes the chair look like it’s constructed out of cardboard, it’s in fact made of wood, with weak joints. Somewhere in there, is an Arduino programmable logic controller that’s designed to detect the number of times the chair is sat on. For this test, the team set that number to 8. You can see the result of the limit being reached in the video below:

Am I the only one who finds it odd that they didn’t have to first register the chair, activate it online and then patch it? Maybe this is the kind of DRM that needs to become common.