This article originally appeared on PSFK.com.
Herman Miller has one upped its own much-loved Aeron with the Embody, its most fully considered chair yet. Along with being 95% recyclable, the chair integrates several health and comfort promoting features (like a 52-piece lumbar support system) that change the way we think about cubicle furniture.
We talked to Jeff Weber, the lead designer for Embody, about the inspiration behind the future-forward chair.
Having a design icon in the product line like the Aeron chair, what motivated the addition of another new chair? New production methods? Different price point? Better functionality?
We were asked by Don Goeman (Exec. VP of D&D for Herman Miller International) to "grow a chair", and we thought about that for 10 minutes and realized we needed to begin the process by focusing on the human at work and not a chair. That initiated what became a 24 month research effort which culminated with the generation of a series of hypothesis. The most important: Can we design a chair that promotes health, that is health positive? The response to that hypothesis by the ergonomic and medical community was an overriding "yes." We then began to discover how we might do that through the physical manifestation of hundreds of prototypes, until we had the necessary ingredients and a formula that achieved the goal.
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