Stairs are the best chairs

There was this simple thought that came up at a Services Marketing Class, as to the kind of seats that we sat in. Typically if you look at an MBA classroom it is a horse-shoe-type setting, where there's a professor who teaches by standing at something called a melting-pot. Keeping the jargons aside, he basically facilitates the shooting of ideas from one corner of the class to the other. In fact b-schools like HBS and Wharton take pride in having horse-shoe classes! I really don't find it to be a big deal. Some arguments in an MBA are really without reason at times. It reminds me of the saying; All fart and no shit.!

Anyways, so that was one setting. But what I'm trying to say is that these settings were meticulously 'made' and were given proper thought when being constructed. But a setting that so intuitively got into our system was something that was never meant to be a seat in the first place. I'm talking about the stairs.

Stairs is perhaps one of those places where you just go and sit. In a classroom, you decide which end to sit, whereas when it comes to stairs, you never really decide do you? You just go there and sit.

Steps/stairs give you all the benefits that a normal chair does not. You can alter height, decide how much you wanna stretch yourself, use other stairs as table-tops, sit at different levels on the steps and surprisingly, you can see everyone even though you sit at different levels.

Stairs don't have cushions, they don't have a back rest, they don't have pneumatic bars to increase/decrease height, yet most students find them the best places to sit and chat. And believe me, they are excellent places to work on your laptops as well.

Now the question is what has all this got to do with the whole MBA setting? Think about it like this… Having swanky classrooms isn't just the only way to make a b-school experience great. Or having great dormitories isn't the only way a hostel life can be improved.

Think… Why can't people put power points near staircases so that we can use our laptops on AC power? Why can't you have vending machines at staircases and not near the canteen? There've been a million times when my batch mates would want a can of Coke while smoking at the staircases. But they were too lazy to go and get one from the vending machine which was 4 floors below.

It's quite surprising that neither the architects, nor the civil engineers nor the deans or directors of educational institutes got this bonding between stairs and students.