So, restrictions being what they are, you’re meeting your friend or date in the park. The grass is a bit wet. The picnic tables are full. What do you do? You bring your own, socially-distant bench along for the occasion, obviously!
Anything goes in 2020, and frankly, the wackier the idea the better. In an effort to allow people to sit together outdoors while still remaining at a safe distance from each other, Amsterdam-based design firm Object Studio have come up with the CoronaCrisisKruk – a nifty little bench with a handle that’s designed to help maintain social distancing.
Photograph: Monique Vermeulen
The birch-plywood structure comprises two krukken – ‘stools’ in Dutch – which are 1.5 metres apart (the ‘social-distancing’ minimum recommended by the Netherlands and several other countries). Most helpfully, a handle in the middle allows allows users to pick it up, carry it around and place it pretty much anywhere they like.
Puns on some of designs play on social distancing: ‘Met afstand het leukste park’, for example, means ‘by far the nicest park’. And the designers are also now offering custom versions through their website, with all profits donated to charity Doctors Without Borders. Amsterdam Museum was their first major client, with its bench now taking pride of place in the main courtyard there.
Outdoor meet-ups are bound to be a fixture of all our lives over the coming months. If you do want to do it in real style, you now have one slightly gimmicky, but still quite cool solution to avoiding having to sit cross-legged on the soggy ground again. The only question is: what exactly are you going to have written on the side?
More wacky ways to keep apart:
This restaurant in a Swedish forest has nailed socially-distant dining
Could these tiny one-person offices be the future of the workplace?
This Amsterdam restaurant has opened private greenhouses for socially-distant dining