Alternative Furniture Design: The Study Cube - Core77

One of the heartbreaking things about visiting South Korea is seeing that most children, including very young ones, wear eyeglasses. Years ago my cousin (a native) told me it's because kids there put in long hours studying, practically from infancy, and that the constant exposure to desktop fluorescents ruins eyesight from a young age.

访问韩国的一个令人心碎的事情是看到大多数孩子，包括很小的孩子，戴眼镜。几年前，我的堂兄（本地人）告诉我，这是因为那里的孩子们几乎从婴儿期就开始长时间学习，而且经常暴露在桌面荧光灯下会从很小的时候就破坏视力。

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That may or may not be apocryphal, but there's no doubt that parents there are obsessed with having their children study. So perhaps it's not surprising that a South Korean company is selling this piece of furniture, the

Study Cube

:

这可能是杜撰的，也可能不是，但毫无疑问，那里的父母痴迷于让他们的孩子学习。因此，一家韩国公司出售这件家具--

书房立方体，

也许并不奇怪：

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The phone-booth-like enclosure features a hinged door with a window, a desk surface that's tiny by American standards but par for the course in space-tight Korea, overhead shelving, and brightness-adjustable LED lighting.

这个电话亭般的外壳有一个带窗户的铰链门，一个按美国标准很小但在空间狭小的韩国却很普通的桌面，头顶上的架子和亮度可调的LED照明。

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The first question you probably have is why, in a country not known for their spacious apartments, would anyone buy this bulky item rather than a regular desk and chair? Here are my guesses:

你可能会问的第一个问题是，为什么在一个并不以宽敞的公寓而闻名的国家，会有人买这种笨重的物品而不是普通的桌子和椅子？以下是我的猜测：

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1. Privacy. This raises interesting questions about how physical constructs do or don't confer a sense of privacy. Think about office cubicles, or the hanging sheet you used to divide your college dorm/apartment. And in a domestic situation where there aren't enough rooms, having a way to limit the light in a room might be beneficial when one person is studying and another is sleeping.

1.隐私.这就提出了一个有趣的问题，即物理结构如何赋予或不赋予隐私感。想想办公室的装饰布，或者你用来分隔大学宿舍/公寓的挂布。在没有足够房间的家庭环境中，当一个人在学习，另一个人在睡觉时，有一种限制房间光线的方法可能是有益的。

2. Focus. When you're inside this tiny thing with no room on the desk for an Xbox, it seems clear that you're only in there to do one thing.

2.专心点当你在这个小东西里，桌子上没有空间放Xbox，很明显你在里面只做一件事。

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Responses to the Study Cube on South Korean social media have ranged from "I want one" to

WTF

to outright disdain; one poster suggested that parents in Seoul's Gangnam district would purchase these, have a lock installed on the door, and lock their children inside to force them to study. (Gangnam is not only the Beverly-Hills-like enclave popularized in Psy's

Gangnam Style

music video, but is also the unofficial education capital of South Korea, allegedly producing some of the nation's top students.)

在韩国社交媒体上，对Study Cube的反应从“我想要一个”到

WTF，再到彻底的蔑视

;一张海报建议首尔江南区的父母购买这些，在门上安装一把锁，把孩子锁在里面强迫他们学习。（江南不仅是Psy的

Gangnam Style

音乐视频中流行的贝弗利山式飞地，而且还是韩国的非官方教育之都，据称培养了一些全国顶尖的学生。

That last ridiculous (I hope) suggestion aside: For those of you that aren't claustrophobic, would sitting inside something like this help you to focus on the task at hand? I can't decide if I would feel confined, or actually lose myself in the work.

最后一个荒谬的建议（我希望）放在一边：对于那些没有幽闭恐惧症的人来说，坐在这样的东西里会帮助你专注于手头的任务吗？我不能决定我是否会感到局限，或者实际上在工作中迷失自己。