Refold – Cardboard standing/sitting desks | Hacker News Reader

Refold – Cardboard standing/sitting desks

refold.co

23 pointslemming31 comments

I tried a standing desk for about a year, with mixed feelings about it.

But guys - using a laptop at a standing desk is ergonomically still awful! If you look at the dude's neck angle in the photos, that is not a healthy way to be working all day.

Just because you're standing up doesn't mean you're exempt from regular 'keep monitors at eye level, head balanced nicely, arms and shoulders relaxed, etc' advice.

I don't know any ergonomic way to look at a laptop. I put my monitors up on a stand so I can look straight at them. Laptop -either the monitor is in the wrong place, or the keyboard is.

How I see it, the standing desk is not about neck health per se. Even if you are sitting you should lift the monitor to the right position to make it more ergonomic (aka have external keyboard and mouse). From this lifted monitor position you can start taking the desk as a whole even higher and do standing.

This is for your main computer stations. If you find yourself on a couch or in a cafe with a laptop you can afford a couple of hours of bad posture

what's in the link is pretty bad for your neck, agreed

The problem is the laptop, not the desk. Without external monitors or keyboard, either your neck or hands (or both) will be in bad positions

I'd pay 25$ for this. I laughed at the 250$ price point.

Yeah, at that price, why not spend a little bit more and get a proper, motorized standing desk? Ikea has them for ~$500 http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S19022530/

Seriously! Giant pieces of cardboard are included for free with other products, as packing material.

But cool idea.

I paid less than $150 for my metal and wood Ikea Jerker Standing Desk.

Couldn't help it either. Their margins must be amazing.

yeah you can literally get a wooden desk for this much

Nice idea, but it's much too expensive. For ~200 Euro more I can buy a standing/sitting desk from Ikea that will likely last a lot longer than three years and has a motor instead of three fixed-height models.

At multiple times while watching the video, I thought it was a joke.

Spilling coffee on your desk has never been more catastrophic

You might want to consider spending $90 for the waterproof top to protect your investment.

Or $4 for a shower curtain.

Not buying the 'environmentally friendly' marketing pitch... The idea that just because something can be thrown in the recycling doesn't mean it's better than a traditional wooden desk.

Good luck find actual solid wood (that isn't extremely expensive). Most office furniture that is 'wood' is actually pressed laminate... AKA pressed together recycled paper or cardboard.

We found that out when a desk at work needed to be shortened so they sawed into it and found honeycomb board (which we sell) with laminated paper on the top and bottom coated by vinyl wood grain. That was a $750 desk from Office Depot.

We try to get pine as it's usually the most affordable solid wood, but it's really soft and doesn't hold up. Oak and other hardwoods are usually sourced over seas and not sustainably grown.

I hear what you're saying about wood v. particle board. I think you may have missed my point though. A ceramic mug isn't recyclable but after 18 uses it's more environmentally responsible than a paper cup.

I don't think these desks will take off. But a hunch based on a rough comparison to the ceramic/paper cup usage (which has been examined to death) tells me that even a cheap IKEA particle/laminate desk is going to be more 'environmental responsible' than a cardboard desk in the recycling stream after limited usage.

Corrugated is the most recycled material behind glass and aluminum. It gets used over and over. Source: I work at a corrugated plant.

If anyone involved with the company sees this, we would love to manufacture this for US distribution. We're right in the middle of the country and own or own trucking company.

I get that, I'm just comparing it to something that's manufactured & transported once. Cradle to grave. Just saying that because something is recyclable it is therefore good for the environment is marketing fluff.

For example, ~18 uses of a ceramic cup = 1 'recyclable' paper cup. https://www.quora.com/Which-one-is-a-more-environment-friend...

Even the scrap that gets cut off and punched out is sucked into an air return that gets mashed into a big bundle. We ship those back to RockTenn for cash. Corrugated gets used over and over.

"Corrugated is the single most recycled packaging material: 91 percent of corrugated produced in 2012 was recovered for recycling, and almost all of that material was recycled into new products." - http://www.corrugated.org/ViewPage.aspx?ContentID=38

I think the point GP is trying to make is that durable goods can easily trounce recyclables in terms of utility/resources, no matter how efficient your recycling is.

Like all systems, you have to measure all the inputs and outputs. Assuming a durable good is more efficient and/or safe than a remanufacturable one is exactly that: an assumption. It is frequently wrong.

Non-recycled aluminum is horrible but recycled is a nearly perfect resource. Glass is about as good as it gets.

That mug in the example might require horrible amounts of highly toxic inputs to be created and not be able to reclaim any of those input debts through recycling. By looking at the totality of the production, you come to realize that durable good is actually a really bad idea (all assumptions here in this specific instance are totally pulled out of my butt... do not take as a claim to accuracy... thanks)

Just curious, as someone in the corrugated industry, do you think they're pushing their luck with the price?

At $250, it's basically the same price as a wooden desk (in fact, I bought a tempered glass + wood desk at 40% of this desk's price) so they have to be pushing their luck there. If it really costs that much, then it's not such a great deal after all. If it was around $60...maybe $75... I would have seriously considered getting one, though.

I sent the site over to our lead designer. He wants to crank one out on our prototyping table in the next couple of days to try it out. We may be able to figure pricing pretty easy.

It's two medium-ish sheets of double wall so board cost probably is less than $50 even with the laminating. The rest is all the variable costs.. labor, production, transport, and the SGA.

They could go lower but at the moment I imagine they don't have the scale to get the costs lower and their market isn't established yet.

$250 is definitely cheaper than the standup desks we have - those things are pricey. Really anything marketed as office furniture is over priced.

For home or SOHO, I think it's value is for more of a novelty or for making your office stand out. Kind of like those ridiculously over priced Herman Miller chairs...

I use a standing desk at work every day (a Varidesk pro plus). For me, having monitor stand is just as important as the standing aspect. Using a laptop on a standing desk causes me to hunch over and slouch, which leaves me with worse neck and back pain than sitting.

I could see some very specific use cases for this, like maybe seminars that have a mobile component, needing a workspace in a natural setting (photogs, surveyors, etc). But as an individual purchaser, I don't have much interest.

Will they be coming out with a cardboard drafting stool?

I'd like something like this, but to fill the gap between a normal desk height, and a standing desk height.

You need a >crouching< desk?

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