Sometimes whenever I watch shows on the National Geographic Channel, or on the Dicovery channel, my favorite shows to watch are those along the vein of "How it's Made" or "Megafactories." Those shows that take us viewers back into how our everyday items are created – from the conception of the idea, to gathering materials that are needed, to the many, many steps in the production stage, to packaging, and finally, to the marketing phase that concludes in the customer buying and using the product. It truly is a wonder how some ideas can be so simple and yet innovative at the same time. Take for example, an everyday item we take for granted: the chair.

We never really think about our chairs unless we are buying them for the first time, or if something is wrong with them. To us, a chair is just a chair, a raised surface we use to sit on to eat, to work, to play, to go about our daily businesses. I wonder how the first chair was invented. It takes me back to the cartoons I see of cave men sitting on stone chairs around tables made of rock. Further up in time, humankind's need for things to sit on necessitated the creation of stonemasonry as a profession, and then, as we moved from stone into wood, carpentry.

It is a testament to the human's designing mind that we were able to come up with a lot of kinds of chairs: we have thrones, stools, high stools, baby chairs, rocking chairs, couches  and sofas (for when sitting alone was not an option),  sofa beds (for when you want to sit and sleep), chairs made of plastic, chairs with one leg, chairs that hang off the ceiling, chairs made of glass, chairs that can be dismantled and assembled easily, chairs that you can fold, chairs for doing laundry, well… you get the idea.

And then around thirty years ago engineers thought about making a chair that totally made away with the upholstery and the other materials and instead went with what people liked most: the soft and fluffy. And the bean bag chair was born. And today you can see bean bags for sale almost everywhere. Made of cotton and other synthetic material and filled with all sorts of things like beans, pellets, and things like memory foam, the bean bag has, as a chair in its own, evolved with the technology of the times.

But the principle behind it remains, where our old chairs were rigid and tough and reminded us of strength and support, the relatively newer bean bag chair is virtually the opposite, it is modern, mobile and reminds us of the carefree side of things, the fun that comes with being loose.

Nowadays, we are starting to see hybrids of bean bags and our traditional chairs. We are starting to see bean bags with dedicated back rests that are reminiscent of sofa chairs, or bean bag chairs with extended foot rests. The human mind is amazing, and that only makes it more exciting for the future of the eccentric piece of furniture that is the bean bag.