Is your chair making your butt tired, Thousands of Butts Were Analyzed to Create This Lightweight Chair

German designers placed a high-tech, sensor-equipped chair in the middle of a palazzo in Milan last month to record stress points on the backsides of thousands of people. The goal? To determine how to design a lightweight and efficient chair that’s sturdy enough to support a wide variety of users.

When someone sat in the chair, monitors recorded data and processed it with an “algorithm that determines the most structurally efficient version of the chair,” according to the blog Co.Design.

The engineers worked with Audi’s Lightweight Design Centre “using methods borrowed from the future of automotive manufacturing,” according to the chair’s website.

This expertly designed chair will have a hi-tech sounding name, too: The R18 Ultra. The chair consists of three parts, notes its website: “a carbon composite seat, a carbon-rubber composite back rest and aluminium alloy legs which can be compacted and transported in a lightweight flat-pack box.”

The project took place at furniture and design exhibition Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan from April 17-22, 2012.

The same technology used to design the efficient chair was also used for an Audi race car.

The final version of this chair will be unveiled at Design Miami later this year.