Humanscale Freedom Chair Features Virtual Lock. That's Right, Virtual Lock!
Posted by Human Solution on Jun 15th 2012
Mechanisms can be one of the more complicated features when it comes to ergonomic chairs. Figuring out the right seat depth, height or back angle is key to making your chair truly ergonomic – if you aren’t adjusting your chair properly then you might as well just have a standard office chair. Many people aren’t even aware of some of their chair’s adjustability options, and others just adjust it to a certain position when they first get the chair and never bother changing it after that, wondering why their pain issues aren’t being addressed by their fancy ergonomic chair.
Humanscale saw this problem and addressed it with the Freedom Chair, which forgoes knobs and levers and instead uses an intuitive, dynamic reclining mechanism that adjusts in correspondence to the user’s movements. With the Freedom Chair, users no longer need to be reminded to adjust the chair – it remembers for you by automatically adjusting multiple features like seat depth, tilt and headrest through your full range of motion.
Of course, sometimes you need your chair to stay in place to focus on the task at hand. Many ergonomic chairs have a tilt lock mechanism for instances like this which allows you to manually lock the chair in place. Tilt lock is one of the primary mechanisms customers request when looking for specific functions in a chair, because no one wants to get their chair to that perfect position only to have it move out of place again on them.
Although there is no manual lock on the Freedom Chair, we at Human Solution like to refer to its comparable mechanism as a “virtual lock” – like the chair’s other intuitive mechanisms, once you adjust the chair with your movement it holds you there until you “release” the lock by adjusting your weight enough to engage the mechanism again. This means you can get your chair in that perfect position and keep it there without having to think about it or fumble with knobs and levers.
So don’t be thrown off by the Freedom Chair’s lack of manual adjustments or locks, it’s doing all the work for you. Just lean forward and get to working, or lean back and take a break. Leave the rest to your chair and its intuitive recognition of your body and its movements.