The Aeron chair is an

office chair An office chair, or desk chair, is a type of chair that is designed for use at a desk in an office. It is usually a swivel chair, with a set of wheels for mobility and adjustable height. Modern office chairs typically use a single, distinctive l ...

sold by

Herman Miller Herman Miller, officially MillerKnoll, Inc., is an American company that produces office furniture, equipment, and home furnishings, including the Aeron chair, Noguchi table, Marshmallow sofa, and the Eames Lounge Chair. Herman Miller is al ...

, first released in 1994. In 2010, it was called "America's best-selling chair". It is featured in the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

's permanent collection. It was designed by

Don Chadwick Donald "Don" T. Chadwick (born 1936) is an American industrial designer specializing in office seating. __NOTOC__ Early life He was born in Los Angeles and developed an interest in furniture making from his grandfather, a cabinetmaker. He studie ...

and

Bill Stumpf William Eugene Stumpf (March 1, 1936 – August 30, 2006) was an American furniture designer who helped design the Aeron, Embody and Ergon chairs for Herman Miller. It was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where Stumpf, working with s ...

and has received numerous accolades for its

industrial design Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical Product (business), products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advan ...

Name

The chair was reportedly named after the Celtic god Aeron, as well as referring to

aeration Aeration (also called aerification or aeriation) is the Systems engineering process, process by which air is circulated through, mixed with or solvation, dissolved in a liquid or other substances that act as a fluid (such as soil). Aeration proces ...

and

aeronautics Aeronautics is the science or art involved with the study, design, and manufacturing of air flight–capable machines, and the techniques of operating aircraft and rockets within the atmosphere. The British Royal Aeronautical Society identifies ...

Ergonomics

According to a 2010 ''

Bloomberg Businessweek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

'' article, the Aeron chair "made a fetish of lumbar support". Galen Kranz has commented that while the company is aware that a perching position (facilitated by the chair's rounded front rail) is preferable, it put in the lumbar support to conform to public expectations—"because that's what people think is required for it to be a scientifically 'good' chair". Sitting expert A. C. Mandal has criticized the Aeron as "far too low" and not offering enough height adjustment and opportunities for the sitter to move. According to the chair's co-designer Don Chadwick, the task given to him by Herman Miller was to update the company's previous best-seller, not to design the ideal chair for an

eight-hour workday The eight-hour day movement (also known as the 40-hour week movement or the short-time movement) was a social movement to regulate the length of a working day, preventing excesses and abuses. An eight-hour work day has its origins in the 1 ...

. "We were given a brief and basically told to design the next-generation office chair," Chadwick said. In 2017, the chair was updated as "Aeron Remastered" (versus the original now named as "Aeron Classic") with a new suspension system, better spine support and re-engineered tilt.

Materials

As described by

Galen Cranz Galen Cranz is a Professor of the Graduate School, Architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the social and cultural bases of architectural and urban design. She is a certified teac ...

, "one of the secrets of the success of that chair was finding that fabric they called ‘pellicle’. That sheer but resistant fabric hit on the right gestalt for where our culture was at." The suspended 'pellicle' seat and backrest are moulded into glass-fiber reinforced plastic frames. The Aeron chair is made out of recycled materials, and 94 percent of the chair itself is recyclable.

Market

Aeron chairs are produced by

and were popular with

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

startups A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an Entrepreneurship, entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses t ...

during the late 1990s, when they were associated with the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

. A 2006 article in ''

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

'' magazine called the Aeron "the Dot-Com Throne", writing that the chairs "became shorthand for the countless companies that didn't have a clue how to make money on the Internet, but, man, did they have the know-how to set up a cool office". The Aerons were so popular that after the bubble burst, one commenter described the piles of unused chairs as reminiscent of a "corporate graveyard" of office furniture. The big volume of sales led Herman Miller through the uncertainty following the bubble. As of 2016, Herman Miller had sold nearly 7 million units, and more than a million chairs are produced every year.

References

External links