It is also missing a foot rest.

There is often a great big gap between what is available (meets basic requirements) and what is possible (crabchair). It is the space that is to boring for large companies to bother with.

edit: It does have a foot rest. I did not see it on this page but it is shown on the designboom link in the article. https://www.designboom.com/technology/autonomous-wheelchair-...

Similar to "concept cars", these kind of things are never really made to be built. It's unfortunate if that sometimes takes attention away from actually making a better product.

It's art. Not everything is optimization problem.

Now we can all ride around like Nute Gunray:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mechno-chair/Legends

Nobody asked for it because nobody knew a crab chair was an option! Now I don’t need my legs to get a coffee?? Sign me up.

I really dislike attitudes like the author's. I think it's great and important that people and companies spend considerable amounts of their time and money exploring the limits of design and what's possible, even if the concepts produced have little direct, practical use today. That kind of speculative R&D can lead to great things and who knows, maybe in 20 years it will lead to something amazing that will benefit a great deal of people.

Trying to pooh-pooh the ideas of tomorrow because they don't immediately solve all the problems of today is just terrible, short-sighted thinking.

And on a more pedantic note, obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all. What the author really means is "I didn't ask for a crab chair".

obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all

That is giving too much credit to the myth of consumer agency and free choice in the marketplace.

The truth is more complex than that: while consumers can ask for stuff and demand changes and make stuff happen sometimes, companies will usually be the ones making markets, and creating a brand image, around things that are profitable and realistic for them to make.

I was telling my parents the other day, that probably most cosmetics were started when a trader got 3 cartloads of some industrial chemical that he couldn't unload on the buyers anymore. Like "oh gosh all this powdered lead will go to waste, unless I convince all the patrician Roman women to smear it on their eyelids!!" Or, "subsidized corn gave us so much cornstarch capacity that we need to villainize talc, which was originally a useless byproduct of mining minerals like uranium and gold!"

And it is really true, at least in a minority of documented case studies, because if you go look up the history of Heathkit and the D.I.Y. electronics industry, it turns out that Heathkit was founded when several train cars were loaded with military-surplus electronics parts. And they were assorted parts that couldn't meaningfully be assembled into commercial products, and the seller couldn't unload all this postwar surplus, so the guy owning the cargo came up with the D.I.Y. idea really fast. And he put in work to write educational instruction manuals and make a market to veterans and young men who aspired to a career in electronics and E.E., like my father, (just a hobbyist).

So I believe there are opportunistic elements to market-making and there are ways for companies to sort of "simulate" consumer demand for things we didn't know we wanted. There are things we want that aren't on the market today. There are features we want that aren't in software. Look all around. The products serve the makers, ultimately, and as for consumers, we'll need to do what we're told.

You're not taking it literally enough. Obviously some investor or executive asked for a crab chair.

Yeah -- that's fair; you're right to call me out on that, and you've offered a charitable interpretation of comments.

Ctrl + F "ask" in the article: Ian Ruder writes "All I ask ... Lord knows we don't need ..." so it seems the article is written from a consumerist perspective. We reject consumerism and individualism as preached by New Mobility, Y Combinator, or their partners.

https://newmobility.com/author/iruder/

Ian Ruder loves Star Wars and Lego. Perhaps in an alternate reality, Mr. Ruder would be building autonomous Lego Mindstorms Crab Chairs with his wife and sons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Plot

What are they going on about? I showed this to my seven year old who is wheelchair bound and she asked me when she’s getting her robot legs. She’d absolutely love to have a crab leg chair that could get her up and down the stairs without having to transfer from her wheelchair to her stair lift. Move up and down a little so she could reach something out of a cabinet instead of having to ask big sister or mom and dad for help a hundred times a day.

You have to build proof of concepts before you can ever even think about mass producing any sort of product, I feel like that’s obvious?

The author says exactly that in the essay, that if they could get a crab chair tomorrow they would be the first in line.

His point is that these sorts of designs are never going to be practical and that he wishes they would put some of this energy into designing the practical next steps for mobility assistance, that focus on the things the community actually needs.

dang: can we change the link to an article not written by someone with an aggressively anti-hacker attitude?

https://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/bizarre-robo...

They’re over-designed, cost prohibitive and generally out of touch with the realities facing most would-be users. ... Unfortunately, they very rarely translate into real world benefits for people like us.

Shortly before the Solo Stove came onto the market, I met some of the inventors at Maker Fair in Menlo Park, CA. They were part of a group that was trying to engineer a low-smoke stove for indigenous women who spent most of their time cooking.

Instead, the women didn't use it but the men used it in the evening to stay warm.

I didn't before, but now it exists I want one. And I have (mostly) working legs.

Though I do wonder if it would be more stable with more legs (6 perhaps), as natural crabs have, as a four leg design will result in a lot of time when the centre of mass is in an inconvenient place with respect to the three legs currently on the ground (I'm assuming it moves slowly enough that it is rare more than one leg is raised). Unless the technicalities of more legs would make it worse in ways less convenient than the balance bonus.

Nobody asked for phone with only 1 button in 2007 too.