Design history is full of famous chairs. This one is famous for making you love work more

More and more companies are putting thought into designing and remaking their workplaces, and managers are asking how to show off the company's brand culture and how to spark employees' creativity and efficiency. But when you list the tools of productivity, don't forget the office chair — and no conversation about office chairs can get around the Aeron.

Herman Miller, the American office-furniture brand, has just updated the Aeron, the ergonomic chair billed as "the most comfortable in history."

Why has an office chair costing close to 10,000 yuan been so sought after, holding the title of "world's most comfortable office chair" for nearly 20 years running? Ergonomics is an abstract way to explain it, but the body is honest: if a chair is bad to sit in, ten minutes is all it takes before your body tells you to get up and leave.

This is the biggest update to the Aeron since it appeared in 1994. The new version keeps the same silhouette as the old one, but every part has been reworked in line with the latest research on sitting posture and ergonomics. Herman Miller says it now accommodates a wider range of body movements and sitting positions, and is more comfortable and more breathable to sit in.

The new Aeron is already on sale in North America, Latin America, Mexico, the Middle East and Africa, with a rollout planned for the UK, Europe and Asia early next year.

Design history has so many famous chairs. What makes the Aeron special?

Design is not short of classic, good-looking chairs, all of them masterworks. But the Aeron's success has nothing to do with looks. As with this update, the designers made no further improvements to its appearance.

This is a chair whose form was built entirely out of function. The most important idea behind it is ergonomic research; "make people comfortable when they sit" was the only goal the designers held to from start to finish.

In 1992, when the designers put the Aeron prototype in front of the board, the board liked its sharp market positioning but had doubts about its not-especially-attractive looks.

The board soon found that it had worried for nothing.

It wasn't so much that the chair looked bad as that it overturned the foam-and-fabric design of the traditional office chair. All-black, with a plastic frame and black mesh, it looked distinctly modern-industrial. The smooth, rounded curves of the plastic frame came from designers Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf: "The human body has no straight lines — biological form decides that. We designed this chair as something beyond biological shapes or curves, a visual and tactile metaphor for the body. On the Aeron you will not find a single straight line, and the fully streamlined design gives the product a greater advantage in fitting the user's body."

When the Aeron reached the market in 1994, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York took it into its permanent collection, and it was called "the gift Herman Miller made for its employees." It could be adjusted at any moment to suit the many positions an office worker sits in over a day, and its suspended design and easy-to-reach controls gave the body balanced support.

It quickly became an icon among office chairs. Since its launch, more than 7 million have been sold in 134 countries — handsome numbers in a market as crowded as office chairs.

In a public vote for the "Top 5 Best Office Chairs" run by the American life-and-tech site Lifehacker in 2012, the Aeron took first place with no suspense at all, followed by IKEA's Markus, Herman Miller's other major work the Embody, Steelcase's Leap, and the Raynor Ergohuman.

How did the Aeron come about, and who was it designed for?

The idea of the ergonomic chair first came into public view with a Herman Miller chair called Ergon. Its designer, Stumpf — later one of the Aeron's two designers — had spent more than a decade studying how people sit at the environmental research center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Herman Miller went on to release two more office chairs, the Equa (1984) and Ergon 2 (1988), but the chairs that sold well then mostly chased a smooth, hard look. Chairs of that kind drew little public attention — until the Aeron.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Herman Miller had caught the moment when America's white-collar ranks were swelling, work teams were getting bigger and property prices were climbing fast, and it launched the revolutionary office cubicle. The Aeron played the same role of market pioneer.

The market it first aimed at was not office workers but the elderly. In the 1970s and 1980s the American population was aging fast, and the only chair on the market with any medical-assistance quality for older people was the La-Z-Boy — a crudely designed chair. Seeing the size of the opening, Herman Miller asked designers Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick to design a chair called Sarah, the Aeron's predecessor. The two did a great deal of research, rebuilt the chair's frame, and got good feedback in testing.

They also ran into the market pioneer's usual problem: no way to sell it. At the time no retail channel existed for selling high-end furniture to the elderly. Management decided to change course and go after office workers, where demand was stronger.

The Aeron kept Sarah's frame but broke new ground in the fabric, using a breathable woven material called Pellicle. Its one-piece mounting meant that, for its time, it gave the user the largest possible breathable surface to sit on.

The Aeron was also the first chair to use a "different sizes" strategy, offering the size that best fits your body — picking a chair the way you pick shoes.

When it first appeared, the Aeron was without question an oddity among office chairs, in how it looked and in how it was made. Office chairs then usually had thick cushions and bulky bodies. The Aeron had no soft-looking padding at all; its structure was fully exposed, and the new material was so thin and light that it looked nothing like what people thought comfort should look like.

Many testers said the chair looked as if it had come from another planet. It was outside what people understood a chair to be.

The breathable Pellicle was one of the Aeron's biggest innovations. Office chairs of that era were made mainly of foam sponge. "Sponge hung from the ceiling of the chair factory. It was the main material for chairs, and it fermented and mutated in the air. It smelled terrible!" Gary Miller recalled. Pellicle also made production cleaner.

That is why Fortune named Herman Miller one of the ten greenest companies in America in 1998. But green was the result of the innovation, not the reason for it. In designer Chadwick's words, "Being green was not the main consideration. We just felt instinctively that getting the most performance out of the least material mattered."

How did a not-very-good-looking chair become pop culture?

The Aeron's popularity started in Silicon Valley.

It launched in 1994, right at the height of the internet bubble. Internet companies that had piled up enormous wealth in a short time needed physical things to prove their wealth and standing, and the Aeron's comfort and revolutionary design looked purpose-built for billionaires who changed the world by clicking a mouse in front of a screen. It satisfied Silicon Valley's vanity perfectly and turned into a status symbol.

Back then, a company that gave its engineers Aeron chairs could even sway where a promising candidate chose to work.

When the bubble burst and many American companies were wound up, Aeron chairs were piled in corners by the hundred. One IT engineer remembered the scene: "A pile of Aeron chairs stacked in a corner — it was like a graveyard for those companies."

Yet although some of the companies that bought Aerons in bulk were swept away, the chair itself was not. It became a fixture of pop culture instead.

The Aeron turns up in magazines, on television and in films. It is Sheldon's chair in The Big Bang Theory; the American sitcom Will & Grace gave a whole episode to a plot about getting hold of an Aeron; and in an episode of The Simpsons that shows heaven, God is sitting in one. It has also appeared in American series including Suits, White Collar and Entourage, and in films such as Casino Royale and Click.

And of course there is one in the office of the sitting American president, Barack Obama.

Why would a chair this iconic spend two years being remade?

An update usually means a company needs to push sales and revive interest in a product.

One Aeron owner asked online: the chair is finished, the brand is made — so as long as human genes don't mutate, couldn't it sell for a few hundred years without a single change? Could it be the Coca-Cola of seating?

Looking at it now, that guess was plainly too optimistic.

The market today has no shortage of excellent ergonomic chairs. Strong rivals such as Allsteel, Humanscale and Steelcase have arrived in office furniture, and the Aeron is no longer in a class of its own.

Herman Miller itself launched the Aeron's successor, the Embody, a few years ago. That chair also came from Aeron designer William Stumpf, who spent the last years of his life developing it; it can fairly be called the summation of Herman Miller's work on ergonomic chairs. In a 2013 recruitment post on Weibo, Smartisan founder Luo Yonghao listed the Embody as an employee perk, and the story went around programmer circles for a while.

Herman Miller's financial reports over the past two years give no sales figures for the Aeron, but their risk sections come back again and again to shifts in what consumers want and in the office-furniture market.

The line between work and life is blurring, working from home is on the rise, and office design keeps moving toward something more domestic. All of it makes the Aeron look hard to fit into the interior styles now in fashion.

Given what a genuine Aeron costs, the secondhand and knockoff markets for it have always been brisk. Plenty of used Aerons turn up on Craigslist and eBay, and half price will easily buy you one.

On top of that, more and more research is picking apart the harm that long hours of sitting do to the body, and office chairs have diversified in response. The Aeron, which from the day it appeared advertised that you could "sit comfortably for hours," suddenly found itself on the wrong side of the science.

The American online magazine Slate has even given the trend a name: "Anti-Aeron."

As with the chair's rise, the Anti-Aeron wave started in Silicon Valley. AOL, Google, Twitter and Facebook have all fitted out workstations that let employees work standing, to show how much they care about employee health.

San Francisco design firm Box Clever, working with Knoll, made the HiLo, a portable chair for employees who move around a lot. Box Clever co-founder Recor points out that compared with sinking into a comfortable Aeron, HiLo's half-standing design raises participation in meetings, and it can also be a less aggressive way to assert authority.

Martin Keen designed the Focal, a chair with a tiny seat, to treat the ailments of sitting too long. Some designs skip the chair altogether and put a bicycle or a treadmill at the desk.

All of this is a challenge to the Aeron's survival

Updating looks like the best way to save itself. It is also Herman Miller's attempt to hold its lead in workplace innovation and high-performance seating.

Herman Miller CEO Brian Walker explained: "What we know about the science of sitting and ergonomics has moved on. When we looked at this product, we felt the chair's iconic status should be kept, but that it needed a matching lift in comfort and aesthetics."

The new Aeron has a redesigned tilt mechanism, an adjustable PostureFit SL (a Y-shaped back support) for the spine, and an 8Z Pellicle suspension system in which the suspension material in each zone has a different firmness. Together they make it more comfortable.

For the individual user, the chair adapts to the whole range of movements and positions people take while seated, from a tense upright posture to a relaxed, thinking recline. For office buyers, its cross-performance design also suits it to many kinds of workplace.

"We believe no piece of furniture on this planet has held its value the way the Aeron has, and that is something we have always been proud of," Brian Walker said. "We're glad the Aeron still has a healthy market today. The new version and the old version will exist side by side. The point of that strategy is to keep the fans and users we have while attracting new ones."

What should an office chair be? Should it keep you alert or keep you relaxed? What does comfortable mean? Should chair design push people to get up and walk around, or should it be so comfortable that once you sit down you never want to stand? These questions are all subjective, and what the public wants is hard to pin down.

The generation born in the 1990s, alongside the Aeron, are now the new wave of office workers, and their needs are more varied still.

But a comfortable chair, in any era, is a necessity.

Image sources:

Dezeen, Fastcodesign, Ergonomic Chair Central

Video source: YouTube