The Hawaii Chair: An Office Chair with a 2,800 RPM Motor That Gyrates Your Hips While You Try to Type, Think, or Not Vomit

The Hawaii Chair is an office chair with a motorized rotating seat that gyrates your hips in a circular hula-style motion while you sit. The motor runs at up to 2,800 RPM. You are seated. Your hips are rotating. Your upper body is attempting to remain still. Your coworkers are attempting to remain professional. Everyone is failing.

TIME magazine named it one of the 50 Worst Inventions of all time, and watching the promotional video makes the TIME editors' decision look restrained. The video shows office workers sitting in the Hawaii Chair while typing, talking on the phone, and performing basic desk tasks. Their hips swivel. Their torsos twist. Their hands miss keys. Their faces show the specific expression of a person who is being moved against their will by their own furniture.

The tagline — "If you can sit, you can get fit!" — is the most aggressively misleading sentence in fitness product history. You CAN sit. You CANNOT get fit by sitting in a chair that shakes you. And you definitely cannot perform office work while your pelvis is describing circles at a speed that would concern a carnival ride operator.

The Hawaii Chair asks you to perform two incompatible activities simultaneously: sit still enough to type an email and move vigorously enough to exercise. These activities require opposite physical states. Typing requires a stable core. The Hawaii Chair destabilizes the core. The result is: you can't type. You can't exercise effectively. You are a person vibrating in a chair, producing neither work product nor fitness results, while the motor buzzes beneath you like a washing machine on the spin cycle and your coworkers document the situation for HR.

The Vision: Exercise While Working (by Making Both Impossible)

The Hawaii Chair occupies a specific fantasy in the fitness-product imagination: the dream of exercising without dedicating time to exercise. What if you could work AND work out? What if your chair did the exercise FOR you? What if sitting — the most sedentary activity in human behavior — could become fitness?

This fantasy has produced the Hawaii Chair, under-desk ellipticals, balance ball chairs, and various other products that attempt to smuggle exercise into sedentary activities. Most of these products provide marginal benefits. The Hawaii Chair provides no benefits and several detriments, because the gyrating motion is too aggressive to allow desk work and too passive to constitute actual exercise.

The motor's rotation was supposed to engage core muscles through involuntary stabilization. If your hips are moving, your core must work to keep your upper body stable. This is... technically true. Your core IS working. Your core is working to prevent you from falling off the chair, which is not the same as "exercise" and is more accurately described as "survival."

The Glorious User Experience

Rachel from Houston, TX — ★☆☆☆☆

"I typed an email while sitting in the Hawaii Chair at a demo event. The email was supposed to say 'Meeting at 3 PM in Conference Room B.' The email said 'Meerting at 3 PMm uin Confetrence RRooom B.' The chair's rotation added letters to every word. My fingers couldn't hit the right keys because my hips were describing crop circles in the seat. The email looked like it was written by someone having a medical event. The Hawaii Chair turned me from a competent professional into a person who types like a cat walking across a keyboard. One star."

Steve from Phoenix, AZ — ★☆☆☆☆

"I lasted four minutes on the Hawaii Chair before the motion sickness started. FOUR MINUTES. I was sitting in a chair and I got MOTION SICK. The same motion sickness you get on a boat, I got on a CHAIR. In an OFFICE. At a DESK. I was seasick at work. The Hawaii Chair gave me the experience of rough ocean conditions in a cubicle in Arizona. One star."