[WTF] DRM Chair

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is something that we often just have to put-up-with in software and digital media files. European courts have sometimes tried to protect our rights to do what we want with our purchases and defend us from heavy handed DRM and licensing practices but this restrictive software doesn’t seem to be going away. Imagine if other industries could use DRM to restrict your usage of the products you have bought, how ludicrous that might be?

To take part in a global design competition a team of designers decided to make piece of furniture that featured a usage restriction system akin to DRM. Below is a video of the DRM Chair. This chair was built to allow only eight uses before self destructing.

The DRM Chair has structural joints made of a meltable plastic material. A pressure sensitive counter in the chair detects when it is sat on. The designers could set the self destruction counter to anything but they chose eight simply so everyone in the design group could have one sit. An Arduino computer triggered the chair’s joints to all be melted following the eighth person’s sitting session.

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