AROUND HOME : The Scooter

THE FIRST GENERATION of office computers--with the keyboard integrated with the screen--condemned office workers to an updated Dickensian servitude. For, as studies of clerical workers with carpal tunnel syndrome show, typing hour after hour at a desk-height keyboard, with wrists raised higher than the fingers, puts unnatural stress on the wrists.

Lowering the keyboard below desk height, with wrists parallel to fingertips, alleviates the stress. One way to assume such a position is by resting the keyboard on your lap or thighs while leaning back, with your feet on the desk. But no one wants to maintain such a sprawling posture all day long; besides, in a workplace it doesn’t look very businesslike.

So some office furniture manufacturers offer articulated keyboard drawers that attach underneath the desk surface and slide out, thereby placing the keyboard just above the user’s lap. But the keyboard drawer have disadvantages: In time they may become wobbly, and they hog critical knee space under the desk--you can’t cross your legs.

To the rescue, in 1985, came office furniture maker Herman Miller’s free-standing computer-keyboard Scooter, designed by Jack Kelley, who is based in Spring Lake, Mich. His Scooter is height- and tilt-adjustable and doubles as a stand for a dictionary or sewing machine, or even as a speaker’s lectern. With the optional wire rack, it also functions as a music stand. When not in use, the lightweight Scooter “scoots” under the desk, out of sight. Interestingly, the Scooter lacks casters. Instead, Kelley opted for low-friction polyethylene pads that glide easily across a floor or carpet. “I wanted to keep the base low to the floor, so you won’t kick or stumble over it,” he says.

“I’ve always specialized in responsive furniture that changes and accommodates to the user,” says Kelley. For instance, in the mid-60s, he helped develop Herman Miller’s Action Office, the world’s first panel-based systems furniture (the kind we now see in large offices everywhere, made of easily reconfigured, different-height wall panels and various desk surfaces, shelves and storage compartments). For its part, the Scooter, says Kelley, is for the computer user “who doesn’t want to be positioned in a sedentary posture, who wants to be able to stand up and sit down and swivel and walk around--to be fully in control of his environment. I’m anti-everything that doesn’t respond to the user’s will.”

About $280, retail, at Herman Miller Office Pavilion, 2575 McCabe Way, Irvine, (714) 975-8700, and Herman Miller Inc., Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, (213) 659-7600.