Coffin-shaped office chair is a critique of the overwork culture

Chairbox, a UK-based designer, has created ‘The Last Shift Office Chair’, a chair that takes its design cues from coffins. The artist was inspired in a friend’s living room while lying on the floor with his legs on the couch.  “I thought that if I die in this pose, they might have to bury me like that. It would be so inconvenient to put me in a coffin. They probably would need a special coffin in this case. I told my friend about it, and we laughed, but after a couple of weeks, I returned to that idea and explored it a bit more. Later, I made a 3D model in CAD software, rendered it, and posted online”, said Chairbox.

One Reddit user believed that the coffin-shaped office chair was a quote from Rene Magritte’s 1950 painting, “The Balcony”, in which the artist painted four coffins on a balcony, and one of them was a chair-coffin. But Chairbox said he didn’t know the painting before and that he created his drawing as a pure reflection of his state and thinking about a recent study that pointed out that sitting six to eight hours a day at a desk can increase mortality. Many people, in fact, agree that the coffin office chair reflects the overworking culture and dead-end jobs employees experience.