KeyCube

What is KeyCube? good question. Im not exactly sure. I began looking around at people working and noticing how isolated it seems. Everyone is hunched over their macbook. Clearly a known observation, but then trying a standing desks made me think about it more. Even while standing, your hands are still forced onto a small metal slab, forcing internal rotation of your shoulders and unnatural posture.

You learn in weightlifting quickly about external rotation. For instance, if your palms, while your arms are danging at your sides, face backwards, its a strong signal that your shoulders are interally rotated, putting them in a position to impinge when you raise your arms.

Additionally, when your arms are held in front of you, next to each other, it creates a lever pulling your shoulders down and forwards.

A keyboard is basically doing all of these at once. So even if your screen is somehow directly in the line of sight of your head while in a neutral spinal position, your keyboard is creating an undue force on your body that, over time will change your positional and movement patterns.

About the same time as I was thinking about this, I was on the train trying to use my phone. I was trying to respond to an email with my hands forced together on a tiny screen, I realized the problem of typing while commuting, especially on a mobile device, was the same issue.

This is a real problem. Study the problem, not the solution! Now how do we solve it?

Im thinking, if we de-couple the keyboard with a table in front of your computer, we can mitigate this problem. In a perfect world, let us assume that the keyboard is weightless. That the keys fall under your fingers while your hands and arms and shoulders are in whatever position you wish, ideally a strong and healthy one.

Coupling this idealistic vision with the physical constraints of reality, I came up with this prototype:

You can see that my hands are in a more ergonomic position for 2 reasons - 1 they are farther apart so my shoulders aren’t rotated inwards. 2nd they are rotated externally from the usual palm down position.

Furthermore, the large block in the middle - currently a large syrofoam block taped up with some hippy looking duct-tape, right now is just basically there to seperate my hands. I think it could also be used as a platform to place a mobile device. This would address the second problem issue stated above with. If you placed your mobile device in this block area, you could type with your hands to the side and typing an email or essay or blog post on a train or subway might become feasible.

Farther out, keyboards like this could be pointed at a larger screen on a wall, ect in order to pair to that computer, and the computer could be used in a variety of different ergonomic positions, from squatting to standing to sitting at a table to walking around, etc. Once the restriction of having to be on a surface is removed, a keyboard has a lot of possibilities open up.

So now, one thing that making a prototype made me realize, is how infeasible it is to hold up a keyboard with the same fingers as you are trying to type with. If you try it out, it just doesn’t work. Thus, the next step for the prototype is suspension on the wrists or elsehow (not sure what this would be) so that the hands and fingers are free to move on their own.

Im slightly afraid that this would limit the angle at which this keyboard-cube could be used and held as rotating your hands up and down would change your finger positions. Perhaps there is a way around this. Thats the next thing to add to the prototype though.