Field Note: Ken Isaacs’ Matrix design concept

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I stumbled across designer/architect Ken Isaacs’ Superchair concept a few weeks ago. It’s turned into something of a rabbit hole - the original article for the Superchair was published in the March 1968 edition of Popular Science. PopSci has digitised their entire archive via Google Books, however for reasons unknown they didn’t digitise the Superchair article (the pages are missing).

So anyway, I now own a physical copy of the March ‘68 PopSci magazine (or what’s left of it at any rate - the glue in the spine splintered into dust when I opened it). I’m keen on building a superchair for myself, as soon as I get access to a woodshop. If I can clear the copyright for the article, I’ll share it as well.

This whole escapade has led me to do quite a bit of searching around Ken Isaacs work, and it’s turned up a handful of links worth sharing. The first is a “composite dialogue” (what an idea) with Isaacs on his design concepts. He did something farther out of the normal band of thought, and it’s worth a read just to see his philosophy behind the designs.

The second link is a Time Magazine article on Isaacs’ Knowledge Box concept. Isaacs had also applied the same concepts that informed the matrix design to information design. First displayed in 1962, his Knowledge Box is a radically different take on a digital interface. One could imagine having a rotating desk inside this, with a joystick to scroll around as you check your emails on the world’s most over the top monitor setup.