Fully Charged: The genetically perfect chair, Dyson’s bit of Hot bother and Reddit’s AMAs become legible

“Genetics” approach helps design the world’s ultimate chair

What if you could take a Darwinian approach to design? Well, New York design consultancy FormNation wanted to answer that very question, and did so through a project called Chairgenics.

In order to create – or perhaps breed – the ultimate chair, designer Jan Habrakan brought together what are generally considered the “best” chairs around. The “genetic make-up” of these chairs – their ergonomics, durability, construction, cost and aesthetics, each of which was awarded a value of 1 to 10 – was then considered from as objective a viewpoint as possible. For example, while Habrakan had to “play God” in making an assessment of the results, he used Google and Yahoo! search popularity as a way of determining aesthetic appeal.

These assessments formed the “gene pool” for an automated computer design process that (with some boundaries set to prevent bizarre mutant chairs) eventually came up with the chair you see above and a few others like it. The first 3D printed full scale models of Chairgenics’ chairs will be exhibited at NYC’s MAD Museum until 6th July 2014.

Interviewly: making Reddit’s fascinating but confusing AMAs far easier to read

Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions, in which a celebrity, expert or otherwise interesting person fields questions from the site’s millions of users, have become almost legendary (by web standards, anyway) – but if you read them on the Reddit site itself, things can get confusing very quickly. Reddit’s layout was never designed with interviews in mind, and that means these unstructured interviews are generally displayed in a somewhat odd order (by default, the most upvoted questions will appear first). Everything is jumbled up.

A new site called Interviewly aims to change that. Creator Dan Drabik has taken many of the most popular AMAs (including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barack Obama, Aaron Paul and Dave Grohl), edited them into a more readable format and added pictures. He plans to add more functionality (like a much-needed search option) in the near future.

[Source: CNET]

Dyson recalls one million fan heaters

If you own a Dyson Hot fan heater, chances are it may have just been recalled by the company. Dyson has a issued a recall for all one million or so of its AM04 and AM05 models, due to a handful of them being subject to a short-circuit fault capable of causing a “small fire contained within the machine”.

You can find out if your fan heater is affected by visiting Dyson’s recall site and, if it is, they’ll fix it for you for free (and slap a new two-year guarantee on it).

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Tech journalism's answer to The Littlest Hobo, I've written for a host of titles and lived in three different countries in my 15 years-plus as a freelancer. But I've always come back home to Stuff eventually, where I specialise in writing about cameras, streaming services and being tragically addicted to Destiny.