A Mid-Century Modern ADHD Medical Device?
A Love Letter to design thinking for thinking.
I’m on vacation in Japan on my way to Brain Stimulation, 2025. For those who want to catch me at a conference and aren’t on their way to Kobe, Japan…there are other options!
I’ll speak at ATA NEXUS 2025 in New Orleans, May 3-6 (with Loren Larson of Videra Health and Jonathan Downar, M.D. of Ampa Health)
I’ll host Rapid Acting Mental Health Treatment — 2025 / Los Angeles with Grady Hannah on May 18th.
I’ll be presenting data at APA 2025, also in Los Angeles, May 17-21.
I’ll be attending any maybe presenting data (This seems likely—I was a co-author on 10% of posters in 2024…) at CTMSS 2025 in San Diego, June 12-14.
I’ll be attending and maybe presenting a ton at AACAP 2025, October 20-25, in Chicago.
For today, a re-run of an old classic. I wrote this article inspired by my dear friend Nate Lacktman. He and I were chatting about the classic Eames Chair, and, while I’m globe trotting, I will entertain you with this article from the archives, edited slightly.
Thinking. It's hard to do just that.
Airplanes without WiFi are my favorite think-spot. But alas, they let you watch movies.
I’m a workaholic. This is not to insult those with an alcohol addiction. I suspect, given my father’s almost lifelong alcohol use disorder, I have those genes too. This is why I never had a drink of alcohol; for those wondering how one person can get so much done when they read this newsletter. Sadly, not indulging in alcohol doesn’t make working less easy.
In our modern age, sometimes we need design to solve our problems. Our desires—and the lure of technology—is strong.
Sometimes, you need time to not work. Time to think. Be a little bored, perhaps?
Walking! That is good. But it’s not always walking time. Planes are good. But hard to get on and off an airplane every time you need to think.
One recent conversation with my friend Nate Lacktman helped us both re-see a tool for thinking. It was hidden in plain sight: the classic Eames Chair.
No. Not the Aeron. It’s a great chair too. This chair:
It is an amazing chair. But, crucially, not for working.
It’s for thinking. It's a thinking prosthesis. For people who have a hard time doing just anything. As a human who both treats and has ADHD, I will note correlates in brain functioning related to craving from Shan Sidiqqi’s work in the human connectome project:
The cravings in the brain for environmental stimulation are a powerful driver of behavior.
But to not work? That would be uncomfortable!
Not working—time for contemplation but not generating anything—needs to be uncomfortable. Or, rather, we need design solutions like the Eames chair to push our behavior away from working.
Nate wrote this to me after our Eames chair conversation:
Dude. You improved my relationship with my Eames chair. Once I started treating it as a thinking chair, everything changed.
The Eames Lounge Chair is an exquisite design in an era before ergonomics was a consideration. The chair is comfortable and canted back at just the right angle to make it really uncomfortable to try to knock out anything on your laptop. It's even all wrong to hold a book and read! The footstool that comes with the Eames chair is so beautiful and so seductive that nobody can justify not having that goddamn footstool—which also means you are going to be positioned in exactly the wrong way to hustle.
I grew up with an Eames chair in my home. Dad had one. It's almost impossible to get anything useful done in an Eames Lounge Chair. That is my point. I propose that with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, we crave getting things done. We want to allocate our attention. Mostly, this attending is done by fixing our eyes on something. That something is what’s in front of our eyes. The headrest of the Eames chair tilts our head ever so slightly back! It is at a slight angle, to gently pull our glance upward. Away from work!
Slightly down? This neck-straining angle is the siren song of phones and laptops. Their notifications call us. If you decide to read a book, your arms will tire. The design was seductive at the time, too, and subversive in its own way:
In contrast to Modernism and its celebration of the new, “at the opposite end of the utopian spectrum was the call for a return to nature”
Modernism was a repudiation of the Calvinism inherent in the arts and crafts design movement—it’s at MoMA, trust me. However, digital technologies and ADHD brains enforce their own relentless Calvinism on our work ethic. This is toxic for our ability to contemplate. Our post-post-modern return to nature? This is a return to thinking and not being able to do anything else.
The irony, for me, is that Eames and his mass production was the hustle culture of its day:
Charles Eames wanted to design “a chair which was a product of mass production and mass production would not have anything but a positive influence on it; it would not be a substitute for handicraft.”
Ray Eames was focused on scalable comfort. If pitching as a founder today, he would say he had a passion for scalable design. My argument? He was also a Med Tech innovator.
Eames’ design is not a solution for our stimulant supply crisis, in which we keep secret medicine available to pharmacies and sufferers alike. It is also not a solution for proposed DEA regulations that imagine an endless workforce of in-person evaluators for the purpose of making their diversion control less administratively unpleasant for their agents.
However, the Eames Lounge Chair is a way to make people desperately want a beautiful piece of furniture because they crave design.
Then Eames made that piece of furniture just wrong for getting work done—in the future! Optimize for doing nothing (quoting Jamie Ducharme in Time):
To tap into true boredom, she suggests picking an activity that requires little or no concentration — like walking a familiar route, swimming laps or even just sitting with your eyes closed — and simply letting your mind wander, without music or stimulation to guide it.
It’s also crucial to unplug during this time…Our cultural attachment to our phones, she says, is paradoxically both destroying our ability to be bored, and preventing us from ever being truly entertained.
The subtle, seductive angles of the Eames chair make doing anything less physically comfortable than doing nothing but thinking. It is a medical device! It is a prosthesis!
A prosthesis is defined thusly:
A prosthesis is a device designed to replace a missing part of the body or to make a part of the body work better. Diseased or missing eyes, arms, hands, legs, or joints are commonly replaced by prosthetic devices.
Many missing limbs result from environmental insults. Our “missing boredom” and associated harms are also modern environmental insults.
The diverse features of mobile phones increase the cognitive demand of users to use it. Such cognitive demand causes cognitive distraction. Cognitive distraction is defined as the user's difficulty to process two or more types of information at the same time (David et al., 2015). Phone calls, texting, and social media networking sites may cause a lapse in attention and concentration.
To be clear, the pervasive impact of attention-hungry devices is a problem we created for ourselves. I am writing this on the phone right now. It's not like I'm kicking the habit. I'm also a realist. The best predictor of our behavior is what our brains tell us to do. Like this chair, this article is an argument for the profundity of design as we make choices to push back toward a healthier regulation of attention. If it's too easy to look at your phone, make it a little harder. If you work too much, sit down in a chair that is just profoundly bad at being a chair where we will get things done. We don't have to go over the top and invent something. We have to think about our environment. We made park benches that couldn't be slept on, so people don't sleep on them. We need to make design choices so that our choices are healthier.
The Eames chair is expensive. I can’t afford one. I want an Eames-friendly life badly. But it’s an expensive chair, at around $6,000. It’s actually on track for ADHD therapeutics, like the triphasic amphetamine sale brand named Mydayis:
How much does Mydayis cost without insurance? People without insurance should expect to pay $449 for 30, 50 mg capsules of Mydayis—about $15 per capsule. This prescription provides enough doses for one month of daily dosing, so a year of Mydayis at full retail price will cost about $5,400.
Someone should start an ADHD durable medical equipment (DME) vendor for these so at the very least I can get the chair pre-tax as part of an ERISA-regulated plan.
From more than a generation before us, the Eames chair cries out to our behavior: make different design choices, and you can live a different life!