How much time do you spend at home e-mailing, searching, social networking? And where do you sit while you're doing so?
If you're an "average" internet user the answers will be more than 13 hours per week, and on the sofa or at the dining table. Even stay-at-home mothers spend an average of 75 minutes per day on social networking and in chat forums, according to a recent British survey.
As well, there's the mobile communications-driven trend for businessmen and professionals to take their work with them. Torben Hildebrandt, the managing partner of Twenty 1, an Abu Dhabi company specialising in high quality furniture, says: "I don't have a work station - either in the office or at home. Wherever my laptop is, that's where I work."
In that context, the question of whether you need a "home office" in order to warrant having a proper work chair seems quaintly old-fashioned. On the other hand, the consequences of spending hours sitting badly are becoming a modern scourge: neck stiffness, misaligned joints and chronic back pain being just the start.
It seems that our mothers weren't entirely right when they admonished us, as small children, to "sit still!", for the human body needs to move constantly, as well as to be supported in all the right places.
The trouble is that "work chair" conjures up visions of ugly office furniture that we wouldn't dream of giving house-room to. But there are alternatives - chairs that look every bit as good as the good they do - and it's from the design-obsessed Scandinavia that many of the best come. These highly engineered chairs may not be the cheapest seating around - but think of all that money you won't have to spend on massages and physiotherapy.
Introduced 25 years ago by the Norway-based Håg, Capisco (Dh6,500) is on the way to becoming as much of a design classic as the aluminium-framed, leather-padded office chair that Charles and Ray Eames designed for Herman Miller well over half a century ago. The Eames chair looked radical for its time - and so does Capisco today.
Its designer, Peter Opsvik, took his inspiration from the first long-term sitters, horse riders, noting their balanced sitting position and good posture. Capisco's cutaway, saddle-shaped seat pad is the result. The hammer-head shape of the seat back is based on a similar logic.
Morten Westberg, a business development director at Håg, describes it as an "opposite way around" concept: "There are no sharp corners and hard edges, a lot of material has been taken away, the arm rests are incorporated into the back. That means you can sit in it in many different ways - sideways, even backwards. As humans we naturally like to move into a variety of positions when we sit."
The look of the chair divides opinion in much the same way as opera - love it or loathe it - but Westberg says that the fact it looks so different has had a profound influence on its success, with 1.3 million pieces sold so far. As the company prepares to launch a Capisco "baby brother" (slightly pared-down; less expensive) this coming week, he adds, "What's remarkable about the design is that, even after so many years, people are still seeing it for the first time and are still amazed by how new and radical it looks."
Having given the world the famous Balans "kneeling chair" (I know, I know: it's too - shall we say - orthopaedic-looking for many of us to want at home), the Swedish company Variér has gone on to develop a slew of posture-enhancing seats that also make bold and beautiful design statements.
At the simplest end of the scale is Move (Dh4,500), which looks for all the world like a slightly oversized bicycle seat on a slim pedestal. Sitting on it is immensely comfortable, however, not just because the seat pad seems to "fit" perfectly but also because its convex base means that you're constantly making tiny movements to stay in balance - rather like sitting on one of those Swiss Balls in the gym. And that movement, as most physiotherapists will tell you, is the key to maintaining healthy posture. A similar gyroscopic principle is embodied in Variér's Eight (Dh6,000), a cheeky-looking stool that would be perfect for a breakfast bar or high work table.
Where Variér has really scored is in designing lounge chairs that are also highly ergonomic as well as radical looking: Ekstrem (Dh7,000) looks like a giant's set of pipe cleaners twisted together; it's little more than a padded frame but it's extremely comfortable. At Dh8,500, the Peel Club (reminiscent of the shape of a piece of orange peel) is slightly more conventional-looking, albeit still utterly modern. Both would look amazing in any contemporary interior - and are perfect for those of us who don't want to sit at a table with our laptops.
