Today, people move too little and sit too much. This is true for adults at home and at work as well as for school-age children and teenagers. This results in a negative cycle where inactivity leads to poor physical fitness, poor health and low self-esteem. For these reasons, some have called sitting, the new smoking.

Our idea is to make the harmful conventional chair sitting more active. Lentala designed two seats -called Rom & Lupa- that invite a wide, diverse range of sitting positions, thereby pushing the boundaries of the conventional chair, which enforces sitting in one position only, causing monotonous stress.

The design is innovative because rather than commanding one optimal sitting posture preventing the curvature of the back, it counteracts prolonged, one-sided passive sitting behaviour by inviting to alternate between different sitting postures. This is more natural; the human body has evolved for movement. Humans really cannot sit still, moreover, people differ anatomically, a universal optimal fixed sitting posture therefore does not exist.

Developed through a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between designers and human movement scientists from the University of Groningen and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Rom & Lupa are playful seats inviting school-age children to take a wider range of sitting postures and change between postures. The invited postures are based on an anthropological study that describes the worldwide distribution of sitting postures across cultures and times. The seats allow children to reposition their bodies freely and find their own intuitive way of sitting. The postures have been chosen so that they can be maintained for some time only to ensure comfortable sitting. With each change in posture, different muscle groups are activated, which promotes active sitting and supports the child's physical health.

Our ultimate goal is not to abolish sitting but to make sitting more dynamic and healthier for people. Yet, changing the chair sitting behaviour of adults for good has proved to be difficult; life-long sitting habits that are ingrained in our culture are difficult to halt. Since these habits start at school (“Sit still”), we chose to start to bring change at schools. Also, because children are naturally more playful movers and more open to unconventional behaviours.

After three years of design development supported by research projects, we can now present the Rom & Lupa, which are scientifically validated to result in more active sitting in the classroom. School-aged children use a larger number and more varied sitting postures and change more often between sitting postures than with the ordinary chair.

We dream to drive a positive transformation from our current passive sitting habits into active and healthy sitting. Starting at schools the children and their teachers will help us break up the current societal norms reinforcing current unhealthy sitting habits.