Sam Hecht and Kim Colin [Photo: Gerhardt Kellerman for Herman Miller]
When you look around at your office, what do you see? Maybe it seems like just a bunch of chairs and tables, a few conference rooms. But that entire set up is built on an assumption about what work means, inherited from the 19th century. If your office has invested in spacious desks for every employee, and Aeron chairs customizable by every owner, what your employers are really saying is: We expect that most of your work happens at your desk, because you’re working on your little piece of the puzzle, like in a factory.
But then, consider the lobby of any Ace Hotel, the lobby of the coworking space The Wing, or the recently opened Public Hotel in New York City, designed by Herzog and de Mueron. They’re all meant to be a free, open spaces for creatives to come and dream up their next big idea. The most prominent thing in each place are the couches, and there aren’t personal desks. The idea is: Working isn’t about sitting alone. It’s about meeting people, finding your personal space, doing your own thing—and not necessarily just the work your boss has assigned you.
If you’re the furniture company Herman Miller, which has minted billions of dollars in profit off of office chairs such as the Aeron, this is more than just worrisome—it’s like a meteor 20 years away that could vaporize your business when it finally hits. And so the company has planned for the possibility. This summer, Herman Miller produced two fascinating office chairs that assume that the “office” as we know it is dying.
The first is the Lino, debuting next week and designed by the design firm Industrial Facility, best known for the soulful minimalism it’s imbued into projects for Muji. The project began with an outright threat to Herman Miller. The strategists there had noticed something odd, as office designs increasingly started to resemble living rooms. “For progressive offices to retain their staff, there has to be softer ancillary spaces. But it’s not like they’ve got bigger budgets,” explains Sam Hecht, who founded Industrial Facility with Kim Colin. As the interior-design budgets for new offices was getting eaten up by things like sofas and cafe tables, there was simply less money to be spent on what office chairs remained. As a result, Herman Miller resolved to dip into the super-budget conscious world of chairs priced at around $300.
The other clever details lie in the manufacturing itself. Industrial Facility watched workers on the line, so they could design a chair that would be ergonomic for the worker to build. The point is, easier assembly means the chair is easier to make quickly—and time is money in a factory. To take one example: Instead of relying on expensively stitched seams, the fabric cover has a drawstring; to create a perfectly smooth seating surface, the drawstring simply has to be tightened in the factory, cutting out hours of production time. The Lino bespeaks an era in which office chairs aren’t worth investing $1,000 into anymore, and therefore have to be ultra affordable if they’re going to earn a place in the office.
Meanwhile, the Cosm by Studio 7.5, assumes that even if you do sit in an office chair, it won’t be yours all day. And so it has to be perfect, with no adjustments, for anyone who might sit in it.