Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (21 page)

All these chairs of the late 1970s had one important feature in common. They were advertised for a range of positions and activities;
reclining appeared almost as important as upright sitting. And as women sought greater equality in the workplace, secretarial chairs gained more features and adjustments for greater comfort. In fact, Emilio Ambasz told me in the early 1980s that he considered the headrest of his executive model to be a functionless “nimbus” and personally used the secretarial model of the Vertebra chair.

From these beginnings the ergonomic seating movement flowered in the 1980s. Once more, the military and the schools led the way. In 1978, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) published the
Anthropometric Source Book
, derived from research on weightlessness in the space program. It determined, among many other dimensions, a natural 128-degree angle between
upper body and thighs and between the thighs and the lower legs. NASAs was not the first measurement of weightless posture; an American surgeon named J. J. Keegan had established in 1953 that the natural resting postion of people asleep on their sides with relaxed muscles was a 135-degree angle, and we will see in Chapter Six that European researchers had reached similar conclusions in the 1930s.
(Even before them, in 1878,
Nature
had identified the bamboo veranda chair of colonial India, with its W-shaped profile, as physiologically optimal seating.) But the
Anthropometric Source Book
was the first work of its kind
widely available to engineers and designers. At the same time, a Danish surgeon, A. C. Mandal, alarmed by the rate of increase of back problems in an increasingly sedentary
society and aware of Keegan’s work, pointed to the deformation of young backbones by conventional school furniture. Backward-sloping seats with lower-back support were deforming the lumbar spines of children, who spent their time not sitting up like typists but leaning over desks to read, write, and reach for objects, distorting the lumbar spine. Mandal’s solution was also to open up the thigh-trunk
angle with a seat that inclined forward 15 degrees and a desk slanted toward the student at 10 degrees. Indeed, he observed that children, and adults with back problems, often tilted chairs forward for relief.
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While forward-sloping seats had been recommended as early as 1884, the 1980s were their great age. Schools in Scandinavia and France were refurbished with chairs and desks built on Mandal’s
principles. And the angle of adult seating was influenced, too. In America, a Texas professor of mechanical engineering and former aviator, Jerome Congleton, designed a new series of chairs now best known under the Bodybilt trademark, with highly contoured seatpans to hold the sitter in place in the angle recommended by NASA and Dr. Mandal. In the late 1970s the Norwegian company Håg introduced
the Balans chair, a kneeling stool with a forward-inclined seat and a shin rest that kept the sitter from sliding forward. The Balans, still in production and widely imitated, shows how technology and body techniques can interact. The rise of the personal computer multiplied the number of professionals who sat at keyboards and monitors all day; it also coincided with a rise in back problems caused
by poor posture. But like many of the other technologies we have seen, the Balans had to be learned. According to Håg, users need one to four weeks to activate muscles that have not been used in conventional seating. There is also an art to sitting down and getting up. For many people, the Balans chair demands a new set of body skills. Satisfied users found relief from back pain and considered
the effort worthwhile; others complained of sore shins and circulation problems. For the first time, abstract ideals of design confronted not only the differences in human dimensions but also those in body habits.
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The athletic-shoe industry, selling replaceable products to individuals, solved a similar problem by categorizing foot types (low and high arches) and running styles (pronators and
supinators) and offering a variety of shoes selling directly to the consumer for $50 to $150. But the ergonomic
chair industry was selling $500 to $1,500 durables largely to employers through architects and interior designers with aesthetic as well as physiological goals. When employees have a chance to comment on sample chairs, consensus is rare, if only because (as studies have shown) most users
do not study the instructions for adjusting their permanent chairs, let alone each of a number of floor samples. For most athletic shoes, lacing is the only user adjustment; for office chairs of the 1980s, there may be ten or more, including three adjustments of armrests alone. One survey of office workers with adjustable chairs showed that more than half did not know how to adjust tilt tension
or back height, and one in five did not even realize the seat height could be raised and lowered.
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Meanwhile, the spread of computers was changing the body techniques of the office. Until the 1980s, most office workers used computers either almost continuously or not at all. Executives shunned them. As their attitudes changed—and we will see the triumph of the keyboard in Chapter Eight—their
body techniques shifted, and they alternated between keyboarding, reading, reaching for the telephone and fax, and talking face-to-face. In fashionable open-plan offices, the totem pole of executive, managerial, and task furniture seemed anachronistic. Like Ambasz, many executives discovered that smaller chairs fitted the new office society. In 1989, the
New York Times Magazine
featured the Texas
billionaire Ross Perot in a cloth-upholstered “manager” version of Klaus Franck and Werner Sauer’s FS chair, designed for Wilkhahn, one of a new generation of seats adjusting automatically to the sitter’s weight and motions. Even Thomas S. Monaghan, the chairman and founder of Domino’s Pizza, was revealed to work not in his $5,000 leather throne but in a “high-quality” armless secretarial chair
kept in a tiny private room within his two-story 3,500-square-foot office suite.
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While many corporations were shedding employees, and income differentials were starting to grow in the United States, designers campaigned successfully for more equal access to seating comfort with minimal adjustments. The chair was supposed to respond to the sitter; active people needed “passive” seating. Herman
Miller worked with William Stumpf and Donald Chadwick on the Equa chair (1984), using a one-piece glass-reinforced thermoplastic polyester shell cut out like an H and mounted on a knee-tilt mechanism. When the sitter leaned back, the shell flexed automatically to support both the upper and lower back during reclining. Herman Miller’s neighbor and archrival, Steelcase, introduced the Sensor chair,
licensed from the German designer Wolfgang Muller-Deisig in 1986, with sculpted, contoured foam support and a polypropylene shell that flexed with the user’s back. As Muller-Deisig put it, the chair “moves when the body moves.” While available with multiple back heights and fabric grades, the Sensor and the Equa were among the first chairs marketed up and down the corporate ladder, and the first
chairs to successfully substitute responsive materials for mechanical linkages. Seating hierarchy became cosmetic; power might bring leather upholstery and a chromed base, not a better mechanism.
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As is often the case in design, especially design for the body, the simple and elegant solutions of the Sensor and the Equa had taken years of painstaking studies, trials, and development
work. By the late 1980s, a competitive chair needed not only to be ergonomically sound but also to be comfortable on a first trial and (with a few exceptions like the Balans) to look comfortable. It took the Italian architect Mario Bellini six years to develop his own body-conforming chair, the Persona, introduced in 1985 by the Swiss firm Vitra and still considered a style leader in its category
by many architects.
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In the dawning twenty-first century, it is no longer new ergonomic theories that produce new seating. Regular changes of position—what the ergonomist Karl Kroemer has called free posturing—have largely replaced the fixation of the older posture movement on uprightness. But there is still a search for new styles of body motion. The most successful and controversial innovation
has been the Aeron chair (1994). Designed, like the Equa, by Stumpf and Chadwick, it is also made by Herman Miller. The Aeron took the idea of a full range of body motion farther than any other chair produced by major furniture companies. At the onset of the Internet era, it offered the most boldly technological look in mainstream office seating, with a polymer mesh called a pellicle stretched
across a curving molded plastic frame that swelled across the back and shoulders. (This was not as radical an idea as it seemed; some American swivel armchairs even before 1890 had backs and seats of woven cane, fashionable for executive seating.) Even the original Equa had two back heights; the Aeron has large and small variants but they share the proportions of the standard model. The key to the
Aeron is an usually deep tilt, up to about 30 degrees, from the ankles rather than from the knees. The sitter’s body rotates away
from the desk and down. It takes a powerful spring to balance the chair; the tension knob moves through one hundred revolutions, or up to three hundred turns of the hand. Some ergonomists frown on this, and on the Aeron’s continuous back, which pushes the sitter’s buttocks
forward. The pellicle lets air circulate around the body but does not allow full cushioning of the seat edge and needs a movable block for lumbar support.
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The Aeron chair has still been an overwhelming market success, not just because of its edgy but elegant appearance, but also in response to what some designers call its ride. Every chair interacts differently with the body. Once the tension
is adjusted properly, the Aeron swings smoothly and can take the sitter from a tedious keyboard task to an easy, cushioned recline. Herman Miller’s brilliant campaign for the Aeron featured young men and women sprawling joyously. Locked upright, the Aeron can still be a formidable throne for an authority figure. Released, it is even more of a crypto-rocker than other spring-loaded seats. Miller
spokespeople have called it a “cross-performance” chair, as though it were the seating counterpart of the cross-training athletic shoes and the industrial skills cross-training that were becoming so popular in the early 1990s. Rival manufacturers claim—and Miller officials deny—that the reclining Aeron sitter tends to sink too low to allow the sitter to use a keyboard or monitor efficiently.

Steelcase had an equally remarkable advanced project, the Leap chair (1999), with a radically different style of motion. Steelcase’s consultants underscored the need for continuous and separate support for the lower and the upper back. The Leap chair is the first to have separate controls for the firmness of each. It has a ride as distinctive as the Aeron’s. The lower part of the backrest conforms
unobtrusively to the spine, and the force on the upper back can vary with the sitter’s weight. After comparing Aeron and Leap in the same showroom, I left wishing the designs could be crossbred. The Aeron had not just its rocking action but a wonderful upper-back cradling missing in the Leap. But the Leap combination of upper- and lower-back adjustments, trademarked as the Live Back, was the most
sophisticated and comfortable I have found, once a user is familiar with it. When I press back to recline, I notice complete support without the usual gap between my lumbar region and the seat back. In a phrase coined by a patient of Janet Travell, the Live Back had raised my standard of comfort.
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The Aeron and Leap chairs also show how corporate spirit affects design. Miller’s Calvinist culture
has always been disciplined yet often surprisingly
playful, hence the rocking motion. Steelcase, still renowned for its massive filing cabinets, built lots of metal into its latest seating. Even the casters of the sixty-pound Leap chair are plastic-coated steel. While the Aeron swings away from work for breaks, the Leap seat remains level and slides forward as the back reclines, permitting continued
work in what Steelcase literature calls “the vision and reach zone”—and also helping cost-conscious facilities planners by saving some of the space other chairs need for reclining.
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If there is a single word that captures both the supple back of the Leap and the bounce of the Aeron, it is
flexibility
. The anthropologist Emily Martin has called attention to the similarity between the metaphors
of the healthy immune system that spread during the AIDS crisis and emerging notions of business organization. Shedding middle management layers, corporate executives want their employees to be risk takers, ready to drop old projects and form new teams in the interest of global competitiveness.
Agility
rather than
efficiency
or
output
is the watchword. Chair design reflects this thinking. For
both Aeron and Leap seating, stability is less important than a new openness to surprises and changes of direction. The adolescent sprawl of college students is no longer a bad habit to be purged with proper seating, but a potential corporate asset that can be nurtured with the right technology, just as the student’s sneaker is the model for a more flexible style of footwear, shaping itself to conform
to the wearer’s motions.
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The new flexibility is not yet universal. Many financial companies and law firms believe their clients expect traditional decor. They are still a strong market for the Gunlocke Washington series chair, the posture seating of several U.S. presidents. And the straight-up sitting style, like the Balans chair, has a strong following among independent programmers. Dennis
Zacharkow, a Minnesota physical therapist and posture theorist, has for over ten years marketed a work chair with no recline mechanism, the Zackback chair, based on his research into a zone of optimal performance. Zacharkow believes that conventional lumbar support promotes unhealthy slumping. Like the original Domore, the Zackback needs adjustment by a second person while the user sits in it. Instead
of a conventional backrest, it has a heavy steel tubular frame on which are mounted supports above the hips (sacral region) and below the shoulder blades (lower thoracic spine)—points that sitters can’t easily locate alone. According to Zacharkow, who exhibits widely at computer shows, over 95 percent of Zackback buyers are computer-intensive workers.
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