Thank you, contemporary designers, for lifting our spirits with wearable bubbles, dining table sneeze guards, and hug tunnels during these trying times. No thank-you for these four pieces of lumber behind which we can contain our sadness and paper towel wads, aka, a minimal home office from Panasonic, available soon for $US835 ($1,153). The labour box is named “Komoru.”
After surveying 1,000 remote workers in Japan and finding that most work in their living rooms, according to Panasonic, designers created a pod that is one square metre large, or, reduces the size of your apartment by one square metre, depending on how you look at it. It is meant for your living room. It is not disassembled at the end of the day. It stays up. It comes in shades of blonde wood and medium grey.
The crime isn’t its dismally inevitable and necessary existence; true, it would be considerate if we enclosed ourselves and our sniffling and our food litter from our roommates, and true, the dining room table is the foreseeable future. Moreso, if you’re going to invest in your own coffin, it had better be nice: the Komoru price tag could easily get you a sizable IKEA desk with shelves and drawers and a few pieces of particle board with at least $US650 ($898) in change. Storage space and trash bins: none. These marketing photographs without fifteen charging cables sprawling on top of the desk like a breeding tangle of snakes? Lies!
But if erecting a work shrine is still for you, consider the tent.