Now I Sit Me Down (25 page)

My first writing chair was a used banker's chair. According to the stenciled information under the seat, it was made in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1963. The rotating maple armchair on casters had a tilt mechanism that lifted my feet off the ground whenever I leaned back. Only the height was adjustable, and that required kneeling down to turn a disk that raised or lowered the threaded center post. The seat was carved with a saddle-shaped depression that was comfortable for short periods, although I eventually bought a seat cushion, the kind with two ribbons that are tied to the back slats. Never mind, whenever I sat in it I felt like Pat O'Brien in
The Front Page
.

I still have my banker's chair, but the chair I write in daily is an Aeron, which I bought shortly after it appeared. It's a perfectly fine chair. The controls work, and the mesh is pleasant to sit on, especially in the summer. If I have any reservations about it, they concern the chair's somewhat antiseptic character. The chair may be 94 percent recyclable as the manufacturer claims, but while the wooden armrests of my banker's chair are pleasantly worn where countless hands have rubbed them, I've written nine books in my Aeron, and its rubber armrests look exactly the same as the day I bought it.
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Such mechanical perfection is slightly intimidating, rather than endearing.

The Chair Becomes a Scale

Following the success of the all-adjustable Aeron, virtually all office chairs sprouted knobs, buttons, and levers. There was a problem with so much adjustability, however, as a writer pointed out in
Slate
. “Most people are not the first to use their office chairs. By the time you get a third-hand chair, the settings have been messed with hundreds of times and the instruction booklet is long gone. Even if you manage to figure out what each lever does, you often feel unsure of yourself—with so many possible adjustment permutations, you always suspect that you've chosen a suboptimal mix.” Niels Diffrient, an industrial designer, was even more critical. “It occurred to me that the chairs on the market at the time called ‘ergonomic' were fakes, most of them,” he told an interviewer. “They were putting up a visual depiction of something that looked like it was technically adapted to human use. But when you looked into it, you found that it was a sham. It was a visual seduction. There were many of them, quite handsome. Nice chairs in many ways, but the claims of them being ergonomic fell short.”

Diffrient was introduced to chair design early in his career. While studying at Cranbrook Academy in the late 1940s, he supported himself by working part-time as a model maker in the Saarinen & Saarinen office. One of his responsibilities was assisting Eero Saarinen in the design of an executive office chair. Diffrient described Saarinen's working method. “You got what you got by throwing away everything that wasn't as good—but you tried everything. I had thought it was going to be a simple job of doing a chair with him for a month or two, but it was a year's effort.”

In 1955, the young Diffrient joined the office of Henry Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss, who is considered a founding father of American industrial design, was responsible for the design of such iconic everyday objects as the first tabletop telephone, the upright vacuum cleaner, and the circular wall thermostat. Dreyfuss was not a stylist; his success was based on analysis and close observation, combined with a systematic study of human measurements, which he called “human engineering.” In 1960, he published a folio of loose information sheets that summarized his offices's research on the human body in graphic form.
The Measure of Man
was widely circulated among industrial designers and architects.

After Dreyfuss retired, Diffrient, now a partner, spearheaded a project that vastly expanded the information sheets into a three-volume reference work titled
Humanscale
. This veritable encyclopedia of body measurements included information on children, adolescents, the elderly, and the handicapped, as well as specifications on human strength and safety, the workplace, and space planning. The section on seating pointed out the importance of using ergonomic data: “Some chairs today look as though the designer never saw a human body—they do not conform to body curves, they overload certain tissues to the point of fatigue, and they do not support the hollow of the back. Most people are so accustomed to poor seating that they accept discomfort as a matter of course, and when purchasing a chair they often place more importance on its appearance than on its comfort.” The last comment echoes Franz Staffel's observation of a century earlier, that most chairs were “constructed more for the eye than for the back.”

Diffrient had worked on a variety of product designs—the Trimline phone, the SX-70 Polaroid Land camera, tractors for John Deere—but he was drawn to furniture. In 1981, at the age of fifty-three, he left the Dreyfuss office to strike out on his own. As he laconically wrote in his autobiography, “I decided to direct my future design activities toward commercial furniture, principally seating.” One of the problems that consumed Diffrient was an office chair that could accommodate different-size people in different positions. Experience had taught him to distrust complicated controls. While with Dreyfuss, he had designed an airplane seat for American Airlines with a pneumatic lumbar support that passengers could adjust by pressing a button. “It was designed simply for two things—to adapt to a person's particular form and to make it possible for him to change the shape of the back once in a while, just for the sake of change,” Diffrient explained. The airline provided instructions on how to use the control but few people bothered to read them. “The sad thing is that people generally don't perceive that this does them good and didn't bother to learn how to use the adjustment, so in time the airlines figured that it wasn't selling more tickets and abandoned it.”

Continuing in the direction begun by the Luckhardt brothers and Anton Lorenz, Diffrient developed a prototype office chair with a counterbalanced tilting mechanism that automatically provided the right amount of support through the full range of reclining motions, regardless of body size and weight, without a need for the sitter to fiddle with controls. By this time, Diffrient had turned seventy and his tinkering with chairs—he didn't have a client for his counterbalanced chair—must have seemed like an expensive hobby, or even an obsession. Then, as he put it, fate intervened.

In January 1998 a very tall young man came through my door announcing that he was looking for someone to design a chair for the company he owned. His name was Bob King and he had been searching for a designer to design an ergonomic task chair to fit in with the rest of his product line. His company was, to my surprise, not a furniture company in the traditional sense; he focused on “ergonomic aids for the office” … His products were high quality and unique so his sales and growth had been impressive. Yet, he remained a relatively small company and felt an ergonomic chair would broaden his line and propel sales and status to a new level … I then rolled in the prototype of my ergonomic chair design and said, “Is this what you had in mind?” I proceeded to demonstrate the features and at each step I could see he was getting more excited. At the end of my comments he said, “When can we start? It's exactly what I want.”

Diffrient assembled a team and got to work. He approached chair design as a set of interrelated problems. “When I design a chair I design it by sub-actions,” he explained. “That is, the armrest is one action, the seat height's another action, the backrest tilt's another action. All those are separate actions. Each one has to be efficient and use the right material. I have always started with a process that allows me to work those things out on an isolated basis before I worry about how it's going to look.” In other words, like his mentor Dreyfuss, Diffrient did not start with an inspirational sketch, a concept, or a predetermined form, but with an analysis of the problem from the user's point of view.

Like the chair joiners of old, Diffrient worked with full-size mock-ups. The difference was that he tested functionality rather than appearance. Often these early prototypes were very basic: plywood and metal assembled with wing nuts to allow adjustment. In his autobiography, Diffrient recounts how I. M. Pei, while visiting Diffrient's studio, spotted a test chair. “He thought it represented a final design, and before I could describe its purpose he complimented me on coming up with such a novel look for a chair.” Pei's error is understandable because Diffrient's prototypes were carefully made; conversely, the final design often did resemble the test chair.

Diffrient's first self-adjusting office chair—named the Freedom Chair—was a commercial success. King's company sold a million chairs in the first decade. The Freedom Chair was followed by a conference room version, but it was the third chair, the World Chair, that was Diffrient's most fully evolved task chair. It was his last project—he was eighty when he designed it—and it distilled his ideas about seating to their essence. The World Chair “would contain all the fundamentals of comfort and support of a good work chair,” he wrote, “but be considerably more efficient and simple.” He dispensed with the bulky counterbalanced recline mechanism and substituted a simple mechanical linkage; he described the chair as a scale, because it sensed the weight of the sitter and reacted accordingly. The back was plastic mesh, made of three sewn panels that, because they were fitted and did not stretch, provided effective lumbar support without any hardware. The simple frame was made of injection-molded glass-filled nylon, and with its pared-down design and lack of a mechanism the chair weighed only twenty-five pounds, half the weight of a typical task chair. That made it lighter to ship and, of course, used less material. As Diffrient pointed out, “No amount of recycling will equal using fewer resources in the first place.”

World Chair (Niels Diffrient)

The first time I sat on a World Chair, I noticed that the front edge of the seat was soft—there was no crossbar to exert upward pressure behind my knees. I adjusted the seat height by pressing a button under the right edge of the seat; a corresponding button on the left side controlled the seat depth. I moved the armrests by pulling them up or down. That was it. The plastic frame was slightly flexible, and when I leaned back, the comfortable chair leaned with me. Simplicity itself.

The light and graceful World Chair lacks the fussy, gadgety feeling of so many ergonomic task chairs today. It must be said that it also lacks the lyrical qualities of an Eames or a Wegner chair. Diffrient was strictly a “form follows function” man, and in that sense the World Chair is more like a Maclaren stroller than a high-design chair. It is not pretty, it is not seductive, it is just doing its job with, as its creator might have said, “unabashed purposefulness.”
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A Rather Unsolvable Problem

Is the engineered task chair the ultimate chair? Not quite. Niels Diffrient devoted much of his working life to designing chairs, but even he was obliged to admit that sitting comfort was “a rather unsolvable problem.” “Sitting is to be thought of as a compromise position,” he observed, “since man in his natural habitat functions best when he is either erect and moving or supine and resting. Sitting is a cultural by-product. In many ways it counters the natural balance of physical man and his surroundings.” He warned that “many of our physical ailments are by-products of sitting.”

Today, there is mounting evidence that the effects of extended sitting are indeed severe. A Canadian study that sampled 17,000 adults concluded that “greater daily time spent sitting in major activities is associated with elevated risks of mortality from all causes and from cardiovascular disease.” An Australian study surveyed more than 200,000 men and women aged forty-five and older and asked them to record their total time sitting, whether working, at the dining table, watching television, playing computer games, driving a car, or traveling in a bus. The dramatic conclusion was that middle-aged people who sat for a total of more than eleven hours a day had a significantly greater chance of dying than people who sat for four hours or less. Both studies concluded that regular physical exercise did not compensate for excessive sitting; the only antidote was to spend less time in chairs.

Mary Plumb Blade, the first woman appointed engineering professor at Cooper Union—in 1946—was not a chair designer but she studied sitting. “You can't sit in a chair comfortably for very long,” she observed. “If you don't use muscles, you don't supply them with fresh blood; and without exercise, they start to atrophy immediately.” She taught that movement was an integral part of sitting, and placed chairs in four categories: heavy chairs that were immobile, no matter the posture; light chairs that allowed movement, such as tilting back on two legs; chairs that became unstable when there was a poor match between chair and sitter; and mobile chairs that were designed to rock, swing, or swivel. Her point was that a chair is always part of a dynamic structure that includes the sitter's body.