"We wanted a totally new kind of chair."

Think About How We Sit

It took seven years to develop the Aeron chair, and that development started in an unlikely way. Bill Stumpf and his design partner, Don Chadwick, were involved in a Herman Miller research project that was investigating what older people needed in terms of long-term sitting. They discovered that one of the big problems was the heat that builds up between you and your chair when you sit in it for four hours. Three years later, when Stumpf and Chadwick were beginning to think about a new chair design, that discovery came into play.

They threw out all preconceived notions of what a work chair should look like.

Starting With a Clean Slate

"We wanted a totally new kind of chair," Stumpf and Chadwick said. So they decided to throw out all preconceived notions of what an ergonomic chair should look like, how it should work, what it should be. They started with a clean slate, and what they came up with revolutionized the whole idea of an office chair.

There was no upholstery or padding. The Pellicle suspension that replaced the cushions let air circulate, so bodies that sat in the chair for hours on end didn't overheat. There were no straight lines on the chair, because the human form has no straight lines. The curvilinear shape Stumpf and Chadwick developed distributed weight in a natural way that relieved pressure points and kept blood circulating. It was transparent and nonintrusive in the environment, yet had a look so distinctive that New York's Museum of Modern Art snatched one up for its permanent collection.

Why Not Solve More Problems?

In 2006, we decided to extend the problem-solving reach of the Aeron chair to a stool. For people who like to—or need to—work at higher surfaces. But we didn't rest on our laurels. We didn't just plop an Aeron seat down onto a higher base.

We kept all the good stuff, but we also developed a footring adjustment feature that operates independently of the seat height adjustment. So whether your legs are long or short, you can adjust the seat and footring so that the stool fits you. And you can adjust the footring while remaining seated.