Toyota Ergo-Twist Seat

Hello, my name is Dominic Taylor I am a student at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill California. I am an Industrial Design student and I wanted to share my process and concept for a new ergonomic seat that I created for Toyota forklifts.

I used good old fashioned pencil and paper, Autodesk Fusion 360 and photoshop o complete this project.

In order to get started on this project I needed to conduct research on operator comfort and common complaints that operators have about forklift mobile workstations. I was lucky enough to interview a friend who operates forklift often and I saw a trend that some operators have issues with their seats. I decided that I wanted to create a seat that would improve overall comfort and provide long term heath benefits to operators.

after deciding on the area I wanted to focus on for the project I moved on to looking for different inspiration that would help me ideate a design for the seat. I looked for inspiration in cooing materials, LEGO’S, office seats, and tools.

At this point I begin to sketch ideas for the form of the seat, as well as an idea I had for a pivoting mechanism in the center of the seat that would allow the operator to rotate the seat by a small amount of degrees. This would decrease the amount of strain on an operator when performing maneuvers like backing.

At this step I created models to represent my idea for the chair using Fusion 360. I also mocked up the chair in Photoshop to show a realistic representation of the seat on actual forklifts. I also created diagrams of the core that allows the seat to rotate showing roughy how the mechanism works.

I hope you enjoyed my project, I had a great time making this and I hope that it will inspire others to create something cool as well. Thanks!