Are You Sitting Comfortably? Aker Solutions Commission Space-age Seat Design for Drilling Cabin Operators

26 June 2012

Are you sitting comfortably? This new design of chair should make sure you are if sitting in a driller's cabin on an offshore rig.

This space-age seat has been specially designed by Alu Design for Aker Solutions to deliver comfort and convenience for drilling cabin operators and claims to set a new ergonomic standard with fully integrated instrumentation place just where it should be – intuitively – and its innovations include touch screen technology, a low-friction joystick, and throttles for controlling mud pumps and top drive motors, all from the same seating position.

A new industry standard has been set by this new design, claims Einar Ulrichsen, chief executive of Alu Design.

"There hasn’t been any significant steps forward in the operator chair sector for years and Aker Solutions took note of that, impressing us with their desire to create a new kind of product to service the needs of operators, both now and in the future.”

Designated MH OCH 300, Alu Design's new seat is designed to provide a comfortable, robust and intelligent working environment, and it has a deliberately slim profile to take account of the restrict space inside a driller's cabin on board a rig.

But it is the result of not just one company: Although Alu Design had a lot of input for the seat and the technical solutions it contains, another Scandinavian design group, Hareide Desginmill had the role as overall design, and another Norwegian agency, Studio Eik, provided 3D modelling support and engineering work.

Leif Larsen was project leader for Aker Solutions on the design of the MH OCH 300. He said listening to customer feedback in the market was an important part of the design process, and as a result improvements were made in comfort, stability and operational performance of the chair.

"We took all this into consideration at the beginning of our product development journey and focused on finding the best partners to help us deliver, quite simply, the best, most efficient chair on the market,” Larsen said.