Maintain a clean and orderly office with this new method for cleaning office chairs out of the aisles. No more un-navigable cluttered “open plan” offices! Read on for a special additional idea involving a harpoon.

, ,
, , , , ,

The Issue:

In the “open plan” office (a more-cramped version of the classic “cubicle” office plan), there are typically there are many rows of desks with narrow aisles between them (Figure 1).

Often, these aisles are quite long, and they may be completely cluttered with office chairs.

Fig. 1: It’s often difficult to walk in the narrow aisles between desks due to the strewn-about office chairs. This situation naturally arises when people scoot their chair out from under the desk in order to stand up, but then don’t re-scoot the chair back under the desk.

Proposal:

Although in a perfect world, people would push their chairs in when they weren’t using them, that is an unrealistic and naïve hope. Let’s solve this clutter problem this with high technology: specifically, an electromagnet.

If we just attach a permanent magnet to each chair and an electromagnet to each desk (Figure 2), then the electromagnets can periodically turn on (perhaps at the end of the day, or during lunch, or whenever the user’s computer is a asleep) to pull the chairs back under the desks.

Fig. 2: The electromagnet can pull the chair under the desk, creating a neat and orderly office.

After the electromagnets do their job, there should be no more chair-clutter-related aisle-navigation problems!

Safer Alternative to the Electromagnet:

One problem here is that electromagnets may interfere with pacemakers and implanted metal objects (e.g. pins in a person’s broken leg). Having an ultra-high-powered electromagnet at each desk might, therefore, be slightly dangerous.

A safer alternative to the electromagnet is, fortunately, easy to come up with: the chairs could simply have a layer of cork around the seat spindle. Then, instead of using an electromagnet, each desk would simply shoot out a harpoon that would hit the cork board and then reel in the chair (like harpooning a whale in Moby Dick times).

PROS: Helps create an orderly office, which should increase both productivity and worker satisfaction.


CONS: It’s theoretically possible that the harpoon might also have safety concerns, but this seems unlikely.

Originally published 2025-07-14.