Crane Chair

Client: Herman Miller

  • Needfinding
  • Industrial Design
  • Naming

Sitting Is The New Smoking

This project was born within FUSE  during the time when became widely recognized that standing was better than sitting. This period saw the advent of work surfaces that raised and lowered. These were expensive desks and the other thing is it’s hard to love a desk or at least want to spend big money on a desk. We know you can make a desk from an inexpensive door and sawhorses and most importantly you can put the desk up high to support standing. What is needed is a chair that can support this  posture.  Even better would be a chair that can go from traditional task height to stool height, maybe even allowing a worker to perch or lean against that chair.  Easily done with locking a few casters!

Also, for the facilities  managers who must purchase chairs for an organization the Crane chair supports all the work surface heights a facility may have.

We submitted this design to  premiere  office seating manufacturer Herman Miller (HM) and they picked up on it, flew our principal to HQ and launched a project to build a prototype. The project hit a snag when the HM design manager went on maternity leave  but this led to our participation in multiple projects at HM.

This was an early concept that was still thermally neutral, but featured a surface that was compliant to the user's contour by being manufactured from a thermoplastic gel. This material has previously found use on hospital beds and wheel chairs to eliminate bed and body sores.