It’s winter. It’s rainy. On the rare day it’s sunny enough to sit outside for five minutes, it’s likely the previous night’s rain will have soaked all the public seating in sight.
Well, luckily for you, a South Korean designer has created a bench that should never be too wet to sit on. The Rolling Bench’s slats rotate, in the manner of one of those unhygienic public bathroom towels, so you can bring the dry section up to the top after a rainstorm:
The tech blog Gizmag has a few further suggestions on how the benches could be used:
I guess the fitness conscious could use it as a really tough treadmill. I wouldn’t recommend it for homeless people to sleep on, lest some wag kicks them out of bed with the turn of a handle. And if you detached it from its legs, you could stand on top of it, walk forwards and travel backwards, just like Michael Jackson.
Our only fear is that Sung Woo Park, the bench’s designer, may have underestimated quite how rainy London can get. And the ability of London rain to fall at angles that seemingly defy the laws of physics: the idea of rain that falls upwards doesn’t seem all that outlandish.
The bench has yet to be rolled out in any major cities, so we’ll have to wait and see – but we suspect that your driest option will still be to sit in a cafe with an overpriced coffee.
