Thinking Diffrient, with the Grandaddy of the Ergonomic Revolution

Neils Diffrient

ND: I'm fine, considering design is not the easiest thing in the world..

ND: I am comfortable in my chair

ND: The Freedom chair

ND: It isn’t as though I would design another chair to correct failings of previous chairs. Designing a task chair is a complex affair with different subtleties and nuances, as to how it supports people and how it looks and how it’s made and the price.

The World Chair of course uses the same standards as the other chairs, but they are nuanced into another kind of chair that is simpler, lower cost, scaled for worldwide use, and at the same time with enough variations in appearance, through colors and textiles, that it can satisfy a different kind of market than the other two chairs (Freedom and Liberty).

Humanscale World Chair

I am a consultant to Humanscale, even though at the moment they’re the only company I am designing for. I always approach the problems on my own first, and when I resolve that there’s value in a different approach or alternative in the comfort standard, then I’ll discuss it with the clients. That happens only after I’ve done some basic development work and built a prototype that they can actually see and sit in.

ND: That is the reason, but it didn’t come out at first. Actually, when the chair was shown in Europe, actually the title was intended to be the Diffrient Work Chair, but as I was talking to people in Germany, they were saying that it’s a much better fit for the European and Asian markets as well, than a lot of other chairs, because of its lower cost its simplicity and scale…then it occurred to me it shouldn’t be called the work chair, it should be called the World chair.

ND: I don’t know, a lot of other American products and attitudes get transferred to Europe and Asia; think about McDonalds hamburgers and Starbucks coffee! If those things move there, then the obesity is sure to follow. But you know for the most part, I design to a range of sizes and those sizes generally encompass Europeans, Asians, and other ethnic types, but the disposition of the size of people is different in each culture. I still have to design for the extremes, but within limits. A chair can’t be too small, because we have the notion that Asians have been smaller nowadays, and in truth they are not smaller then they were 50 years ago. So, it’s necessary that I accommodate 90% of the population and hopefully, even 95.

ND: There’s a guarantee for 15 years, 24/7 so I guess there’s no concern about its durability. Its made of a kind of plastic that we have not used, say, 10-15 years ago; it’s the latest reinforced plastic that has amazing durability. These materials begin to approach the strength of metal, at sometimes half the weight, not to mention their ability to form compound forms, curves, and the like. So it has now reached the stage where this kind of plastic is strong enough and moldable in large pieces and it is durable and long lasting. Obviously, everything breaks but the tests we run on it show it to be remarkably strong, because it’s flexible. Metal is sometimes rigid and in extreme strength tests it’ll just break. The latest airliners are going to be made of plastic.

Humanscale World Chair

Everybody is switching to plastic; Boeing will probably be the first all- plastic major airliner in the marketplace and its already flying! These materials are evolving so we have designed the chair in accordance to that.

ND: I have several unique features in my chairs that I have arrived at through a lot of effort and testing. “Form-sensing mesh,” as it’s called by the PR people is really a development that I came up with, through testing, that allows a single sheet of material - in other words, a woven mesh - to accommodate itself to body contours. Now nobody else has this  - other mesh chairs stretch a single sheet of mesh across the opening of the frame and then make it stretchy so when you lean against it, it gives way and tends to follow your body shape. Well, that has some major faults in it. First of all, if it stretches, it means its not providing adequate support. So that’s why you see (in most other mesh chairs) a secondary lumbar support device. When you have that, you defeat the original purpose of the mesh, which is to support a large area of your back, and the lumbar only concentrates the load in a small area, which is the exact opposite you want to do. That one feature – if you have a Freedom Chair, you’re well aware of this, the coordinated arm adjustment system – it is the first one on the market and its exclusive to us. Its adjusts further up and down and coordinates arms on either side without a lot of releases and adjustments, automatic headrests and the other features that are by-products of a lot testing. If it works well, then I’m inclined to use it in other products, because for balance there’s nothing better.

ND: Feedback from the average, in my mind, is not reliable, at least not in the usual sense. Most market research people ask their presumed population what they think of something, but that’s like asking someone a technical question like “Would you prefer appendicitis or a gall bladder operation.” People just don’t know enough about their own bodies to give you a qualified answer. So I use other means to find out what people want and some them of seem pretty obvious, which is observation. I don’t know if you know this, but I have a long history in it, though I don’t claim to be a specialist in it, and am published in the field of ergonomics. I remain a designer, but my consensus was: to design something of consequence, you have to know what you’re doing to the people that use it. So, I observe and learn quite a bit about them, how they squirm, how they move around, even the look on their face. Other things, of course, are much more scientific. We have pressure monitors, testing devices that give us some backup to what we suspect is a proper approach, so that in my reading - the support of say, the back mesh on the chair, it is closer to supplying the kind of support that is needed than any other chair. I can’t think of another chair that does it better. Even the Freedom chair, which doesn’t have mesh, is not quite as compliant as a result. The backrest has to adjust up and down. The three-part sewing contours the non-stretch mesh – it is like buying a fitted suit and because it doesn’t stretch, it will accommodate itself to people of sizes and shapes. Because the World Chair is adaptive, it will change its shape to match the shape of a person’s backside without giving way, like a stretch mesh.

ND: No adjustments or controls! There are two buttons, one on right and one on left, below the seat. There are the only two primary adjustments necessary. The one is seat height from floor and the seat depth from the backrest, for example people with long legs or short legs. Now if you get a pair of adjustable arms, those have an adjustment, but it’s a natural adjustment so that’s a feature that I’m very proud to have accomplished. A lot of chairs haven’t been able to eliminate controls. All my chairs do not have to be adjusted for the force required to recline, which is always a proportional force, related to your body weight: if you’re heavy it takes more weight to recline the back as it should be, and if you’re light it takes less weight to recline the back. And all those knobs and adjustments necessary to make it recline properly are gone and are a lot of other adjustments on the chair should be self-evident and should not require a degree to operate. Simplicity is a virtue and with that said it doesn’t come without a price, and the price is that it’s much harder to achieve.

Humanscale World Chair

ND: Like everything else, all the advancements in technology allow you to make things you couldn’t do years back. The other thing is knowledge. You see I started 50 years ago, studying ergonomics. Prior to that, everyone had to do that, pardon the expression, by the seat of his or her pants. Now some people were really sensitive and did a really good job, but without the data that comes with more ergonomic investigations, you don’t have a foundation to do things. So it’s just a natural evolution of technology and knowledge advancement that allows you to do things differently. Now the one thing that concerns me, that I mentioned earlier, is that most of task chairs are sold with a heavy reaction, from the buyer to its looks, how it looks, and this is unfortunate. But what it results in, is that most of the attention that the public gives to furniture is based on appearance. Now, there’s two separations of furniture, one is what I call as decorative and the other is what I call performance. The decorative is what you see most of. Look at any magazine about interiors and most furniture that you see it doesn’t do anything. It’s static and it’s that way because it’s fundamentally a piece of sculpture that people look at, like the looks of and use it in interior design. There’s very little of publicizing or education about performance furniture in any of our journals or museums, if you will. So it’s unfortunate, in that the performance furniture is what people use when they go to work. That’s the reason I’m talking about your article I think its unusual when I am asked to give a technical opinion - most media aren’t interested in that side of it.

ND: I’m sure you’ve heard from any well-informed facility manager that buying a good chair, though it may cost 1000 dollars is way cheaper than the cost of fixing peoples’ backs and the risks as well.

ND: That’s territory I don’t want to venture into, but you can figure that out for yourself. Run through the latest interior design or architectural magazines. The people you see who are up and coming are in the category I talked about, decorative design. There’s no one you’re going to see in performance design, because they’re not featured anywhere. The one so-called product design magazine we had, ID magazine, has folded, so there’s no forum for serious performance design. To answer your question, you have to experience the kinds of people who are occupied with performance design directly and they’re usually not the ones that care as much about being in the interior design magazines. But there aren’t many I can tell you, and if you notice you’ll see that the only advanced performance chairs particularly, principally occurs in large corporations, where they have a staff of ergonomicists and a big staff of engineers design developers and manufacturers - all of those people are required to do a really good piece of performance furniture; that’s why there are only a handful of individuals who can do it without that kind of backup.

ND: I’m doing more design. I’m designing all the time.

ND: I’m always thinking of new chairs. I don’t know how many I’ll bring into commission, but I have lots of ideas and actually, there are some new ones in development at Humanscale. So there’s more down the line, but keep in mind the kind of design I mention doesn’t happen quickly. The World chair is actually a project that started over 10 years ago, so it doesn’t happen quickly. I don’t work like other designers, I never draw an appearance design in the earlier stages I never draw the way things will look .I usually start with a single element. For instance adjustable arms or something that’s very important for all the people I spent 2 years just studying adjustable arms, which ended up on the freedom chair. It had nothing to do with the chair itself it was just how to do the ideal set of adjustable arms that accomplished what I wanted it to and then I would begin to adapt it to the chair so I don’t work the way most designers do, I put the appearance on the sideline until the end.

ND: I won’t answer that question directly, because that’s one that would be guesswork to some extreme. I’ll answer telling you where the root of the next chairs will come from and that’s - mobile computing devices. You will find most of work is going to change, based on the fact that you no longer have to be anchored in front of an immovable. We already started down that road and it will continue. One of the chairs I designed - I don’t know if it will reach market because its too advanced - changes the nature of work entirely, based on the handheld device, and this I started 20 years ago, before I even knew about computers. To a great extent, it was counteracting the difficulties of a dedicated office space.