Evolution of my desk part 1

tl;dr I experimented with my keyboard and computer setup. Imgur album. Initially, I thought this would be a good idea:


Many iterations later, I ended up with this:


and this:


How it started

A year ago I went on vacation and realized I had a lot of tension and pain in my shoulders and back. The pain was caused by my posture, programming at my desk all day. In particular,


Source

Standing desk

A standing desk improved my posture.

I had tried a standing desk before (along with everyone else in the office), but found I couldn’t stand all day. I would gradually begin sitting 25% of the day, then 50%, then 75%, then 100%. Another colleague, @Manoj, had a genius idea. He was using a standing desk, but he had a balance board to keep him moving around while standing. I immediately copied him and iterated, adding a standing mat on top of it. After digging a small hold in the wooden floor, management asked me to iterate again, and I stuffed an old shoe underneath.


The balance board didn’t make it possible to stand all day, but it helped. I often had to stand on one leg and kneel on my standing desk with the other. People made memes.


Two keyboards

Two keyboards got me away from tensing inwards.

Placing my hands together in front of me on a keyboard was curving and tensing my upper back and shoulders. My first inspiration for freeing myself from this tension was seeing my colleague, @Oaten’s, split keyboard.

I looked online for the keyboard and found that it was unreasonably priced - £80. I knew I could make do with two of my old bad keyboards for free.

I placed the two keyboards on top of my standing desk, but they didn’t fit side-by-side, along with a laptop and a monitor. I needed to either get a bigger desk or smaller keyboards. I decided to try cutting a keyboard in half.

I borrowed a hacksaw and sandpaper from @javier, picked out some screwdrivers from the company’s toolbox, and disassembled a keyboard.



The internals of keyboards are simple. There are two paper-thin plastic sheets with circuits embedded within. When two metal contacts from different sheets touch, it means a key is pressed. Each key on your keyboard has a rubbery dome covering a little pin, which when pressed, causes the two sheets to contact at that point.

I figured messing with the circuits would fail, so I left the plastic sheets and sawed the hard plastic casing in half, then placed a sheet of paper between the exposed plastic sheets. Sometimes keys became unresponsive. I first tried with a wired keyboard, which worked beautifully. A while later, I tried two wireless keyboards. They never worked quite as well because I had to deal with battery placement.




Using two keyboards was initially awkward, but quickly became just as comfortable as using one. A caveat is that it would slow you down if you’re not a touch-typist. Occassionally I miss keys without looking like “]” or “&”, so if I’m looking at the keyboard, it’s only ever the right-hand one.

Gauntlets

I had a vision of being completely mobile and still typing productively. I tried to achieve this with keyboard gauntlets. I bought two cheap wireless keybaords (£10 each), and thought about how to attach them to my hands. I experimented with my one cut-in-half keyboard, tried strapping it to my hand, but it blatantly obstructed typing. I Googled and Amazoned for gauntlets, but found nothing that made sense. I went to a large Decathalon sports store to spark some creativity.

I roamed the aisles searching and considering: boxing gloves, while an obvious choice, were expensive and not suited for purpose. All sorts of other golves - riding, golfing, skiing, cycling, lifting - weren’t appropriate either. Splinting a badminton racquet to each arm was the best solution I could see… until I walked past the swimming section. Flippers, while made for feet, were exactly what I was looking for. They were gauntlet-like and had a platform to place a keyboard. I spent the next 20 minutes in the store sticking my hand in children-sized flippers, imagining the right size and orientation for my forearm, considering how I would cut the holes. I found a suitable size EU 5 pair for £5.



Over the course of the next few weeks, I slowly carved out and constructed the keyboard gauntlets. The first step was to cut out the sole of the flipper to fit my arm through. The flipper needed another point of attachment to my arm or it would flop around and tip over. I threaded shoelace through the rubber near the heel-end. It was also rather abrasive in the parts where I hacksawed through rough plastic, so I covered those parts with pieces of old shoes and electrical tape. I stuck velcro on the platform area of the flipper and the the bottom of the wireless keyboards so they could be firmly attached, but adjustable.



Half a keyboard and a flipper are just too heavy to lift continuously or leave dangling by your sides. I had to rest the flippers on a desk, but that made me immobile - defeating the purpose. I threaded a string through the ends of the flippers and attached them to a backpack so my shoulders and back could bear the weight.


This setup had two major problems:

  1. It’s natural to move your hands around the keyboard, and that’s not possible when the keyboard is fixed to your forearm (try accessing the delete/esc keys)
  2. It took a lot of time to put on and start typing

Mounted keyboards

Mobile typing was an interesting goal, but provided little utility. Still, keyboards sitting atop a standing desk didn’t feel ergonomic enough for me.

Another inspiration I had when figuring out how to make mobile typing possible was Dr. Octopus.


Wikipedia source

Having experienced the high difficulty of making keyboards wearable, I made the compromise of Dr. Octopus-ing my desk instead. I bought two large wired keyboards and a set of flexible arm tablet holders. I quickly found that I needed two tablet holders per keyboard, and that it was difficult to get the keyboards in a comfortable orientation: once the keyboards + tablet holders were in place, it wasn’t worth moving them. It was ok, though, since the convenience of the ergonomic keyboard setup always working was worth the reduction in mobility. I speared squishy balls onto the setup for palm rests.


The balance board combines nicely with the palm rests and extending keyboards, so that you can subtly balance yourself when needed. The keyboards can move slightly if you press much too hard, but the setup is strong enough for reasonable use. The palm rests are incredibly useful to find hand placement on keyboards, since they’re larger tactile locators than the bumps in the “f” and “j” keys.



The setup is great for pair-programming, but pairers sometimes find the large screen to be too far away. I’ve only once had another developer plug in their keyboard to the setup to pair-program, so it’s amenable to multiple people using the same computer. Unfortunately, the setup is not usable by others. It’s rather intimidating, and takes a few days to get used to the two keyboards / standing / wobble board. It’s adapted to my height and preferred arm positioning, so it’s immediately uncomfortable to anyone not ~6’1”-6’5”.



As a tech lead, much of my day is spent near my desk, but about half is interacting with other developers, product owners, stakeholders, etc. That means I don’t need to be standing at my computer all the time. When my attention isn’t on my computer, I take a seat to talk or ponder. That said, when it’s a quiet (individually productive) day, standing for more than an hour at a time is uncomfortable.

A standing alternative

When I alternated between sitting in a chair and standing, I would inevitably begin to spend all my time sitting. A good solution was to not have a chair, but to use nearby couches after standing too long. This also wasn’t a perfect solution because my couch-sitting posture is bad and a small laptop monitor reduces productivity. My requirements for an alternative setup were strange:

Around this time, I also bought an ironing board. @Manoj had one in his flat, and it was usable as a budget adjustable standing/sitting desk. My intentions were to attach my keyboards to it so that I could easily adjust the height of the keyboards. The edges of the ironing board were too flimsy and the tablet-holding clamps weren’t versatile enough, so this wasn’t possible, but the ironing board was still an adjustable-height desk.

I had also recently bought a stool for meditation. I was using it to meditate at lunchtime, but it turned out to be a great alternative to sitting in an office chair - about as comfortable as standing and encourages decent posture. I adjusted the ironing board to a reasonable height and found a spare monitor. The standing mat made a great kneeling mat, and all I needed was a comfortable keyboard. @Oaten very generously gave me the split keyboard that seeded my desk evolution, and I tore a plank from a standing desk so I could tape it to the ironing board.




This kneeling setup is great, but pair programming is not possible. It’s already an introverted setup, since it’s resting underneath the mounted arms, hiding behind the towering monitors above.

Conclusion



This experience has confirmed all the tropes and advice I’ve heard about innovation, even if it was a very trivial innovation:

Next, I’m thinking about integrating open office acoustic blocking. I bought pyramid foam and acoustic barrier mat so I can…

13 Jun 2017