"We wanted a totally
new kind of chair."

Herman Miller turned to designers Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf to design a totally new kind of chair. Chadwick's and Stumpf's previous collaboration had produced the groundbreaking Equa chair. The two designers began this development process with a clean slate, with no assumptions about form or material, but with some strong convictions about what a chair ought to do for a person. Ergonomically, it ought to do more than just sit there. It should actively intercede for the health of the person who sits in it longer than she should.

Functionally, it ought to move and adjust as simply and naturally as possible. It should support a person in any position he cares to assume, at any task his office job serves up.
Anthropometrically, it ought to be more inclusive than its predecessors. It should do more than accommodate small or large people; it should really fit them.

Environmentally, it ought to be benign. It should be sparing of natural resources, durable and repairable, designed for disassembly and recycling. The design that fulfilled these criteria met all expectations and shattered some of them. It wasn't upholstered. It wasn't padded. It was dimensioned in three models that looked exactly alike and that had nothing to do with their users' job titles. It didn't look like any other office chair. And its revolutionary concept incorporated more patentable ideas than any previous Herman Miller research program.
"It was a matter of deliberate design to create a 'new signature shape' for the Aeron chair," says designer Bill Stumpf. "Competitive ergonomic chairs became look-alikes. Differentiation was a huge part of the Aeron design strategy, and it remains one of, if not the most, critical aspects of Aeron's success.

Made largely of recycled materials, the Aeron chair is designed to last a long time, with parts that get the most wear easily replaced and recycled. Just what you would expect in a well thought-out design.

• It was tested for comfort with scores of users, pitting it against the best work chairs available.
• Leading ergonomists, orthopedic specialists, and physical therapists evaluated the chair's fit and motion, the benefit and ease of its adjustments.
• The design team conducted anthropometric studies across the country, using a specially developed instrument to calculate everything from popliteal height to forearm length.
• The research team did pressure mapping and thermal testing to determine the weight distribution and heat- and moisture-dissipating qualities of the Pellicle material on the chair's seat and back.
• Field studies using a specially-designed measuring device examined the relationship between sizes of people and their preference for chair size (Dowell 1995b). Measurements of 224 people--in a sample that was evenly distributed between men and women and that closely reflected the of all the anthropometric dimensions measured, height and weight had the strongest relationship to chair size preference. The relationship is strong enough to allow us to recommend one of the three chair sizes based on those dimensions. distribution of the U.S. population on most dimensions--found that