Aeron Chair History: Herman Miller’s Office Staple Was Originally Designed for the Elderly.
Aeron Chair History: Herman Miller’s Office Staple Was Originally Designed for the Elderly.
After the great dot-com bust of 2000, there was one lasting symbol of the crash: Herman Miller’s Aeron chair. The ergonomic, mesh-backed office chair was launched in 1994, at the start of the bubble; at a cost of more than $1,000 at the time, it quickly became a status symbol in Silicon Valley—spotted constantly in magazines and in cameos on TV and film. Then, as the dot-coms failed, the chairs went empty. As one information architect told New York magazine years later, he remembered them “piled up in a corner as a kind of corporate graveyard.” He went on: “They’re not in my mind an example of hubris as much as they are an example of companies trying to treat their staff more generously than they could actually afford.”
The Aeron was a throne perfectly tailored to Silicon Valley’s vanities. With a frame of high-tech molded plastic, a skin of woven plastic fibers pulled taut, and mechanics that accommodated slouchy rebels, the chair flattered the people who bought it. It was the best engineering money could buy, and it seemed purpose-built for squeaky-voiced billionaires inventing the future in front of a computer. But the Aeron’s origin story isn’t so simple. The apotheosis of the office chair—and perhaps the only one ever to become a recognizable and coveted brand name among cubicle-dwellers—was actually the unexpected fruit of a 10-year effort to create better furniture for the elderly.
One the Aeron’s designers was Bill Stumpf, the son of a gerontology nurse and a preternaturally keen observer of human behavior. So he was well primed in the late 1970s, when the American furniture company Herman Miller began casting about for growth prospects and hired Stumpf and Don Chadwick—who had done several pieces for Herman Miller—to investigate the potential of furniture for the elderly. It seemed like a tantalizing market opportunity. The American populace was aging quickly, assisted living facilities were rare, and hospitals lacked ergonomic furniture suited to long-term care. In each environment, Stumpf and Chadwick observed the surest sign of an opportunity: furniture being used in unintended ways. The homely workhorse common in both medical and residential settings was the La-Z-Boy. In hospitals, the elderly often got dialysis in semireclined La-Z-Boys; at home they spent hours in them watching TV. “The chair becomes the center of one’s universe. These sorts of realizations at the time weren’t just overlooked, they weren’t [deemed] important,” says Clark Malcolm, who helped manage the project. Those observation studies and focus groups “made Bill and Don focus on seating, in a way they never had before.”