Taking a Zoological Approach to Chairs

April 24, 2011
The New York Times. By ALICE RAWSTHORN

LONDON — The 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin was so eminent a scientist that some 120 species, an Australian city and a mountain in the Andes have been named in his honor, but among his other accomplishments is a modest footnote in design history for an unsung contribution to furniture design.

Darwin designed the earliest known example of the wheeled chairs that millions of people now sit or slouch on in offices all over the world. He customized a wooden armchair in his family home in the English countryside during the 1840s by removing the legs and replacing them with a set of cast-iron bed legs mounted on casters. Darwin then literally rolled around his study to scrutinize specimen after specimen.

This early example of what is now called “design hacking” or “co-design” has won Darwin a bit part role in “A Taxonomy of Office Chairs,” a new book by the American industrial designer and design researcher Jonathan Olivares.

Deriving from the Ancient Greek words “taxis” and “nomia,” which translate as “arrangement” and “method” respectively, a “taxonomy” is a system of classification. This word alone suggests that Mr. Olivares has taken an unusually thoughtful and rigorous approach to his subject, and distinguishes his book from the usual run of image-heavy, fact-lite coffee table-crushing design tomes.

So it should. His book contains three different forms of classification. The first section is a chronological catalog of 142 office chairs, which Mr. Olivares considers to have been particularly innovative. The second is a taxonomy that charts the development of different parts of the chair, including the headrest, backrest, armrest, seat, stem and base. Some 11 types of backrest alone are identified: single spine, split single spine, single spine with armrest connections, and so on. A third section is devoted to milestones in the movement of office chairs: from the 360-degree tilt of the stem in the 1849 Centripetal Spring Chair, to the sideways tilt of the backrest in the 2009 ON Chair.

Each section is packed with facts and illustrated frugally, by a photograph of the silhouette of each chair in the chronology, and simple line drawings of parts in the taxonomy and catalog of movement. Mr. Olivares has also devised a reader-friendly means of cross-referencing the information on each chair in all three sections using the page numbers. The result shares the clarity and ingenuity of another recently published book “I swear I use no art at all” in which the Dutch book designer Joost Grootens described his work through a series of maps, grids, charts, indices and other visual devices.

Mr. Olivares’s original objective wasn’t to analyze the office chair specifically, but to trace the evolution of an industrial product as thoroughly and as objectively as biologists and zoologists have studied nature. As he admits, the book could just as easily have been a taxonomy of toasters or automotive engines, but he plumped for office chairs because they combine mechanical complexity with a close relationship to the human body.

He chose well. The most compelling design histories of objects are invariably of things that are any or (ideally) all of the following: a) familiar enough for everyone to recognize, even people who don’t use them; b) sufficiently challenging in terms of their structure or operating system to persuade the ablest designers and manufacturers to produce them; and c) reflective of their time, particularly of social, economic, cultural and behavioral changes.

Very few objects check all of those boxes, but the office chair does. It has the additional advantage of being used so intensively by the tens of millions of people who spend most of their working days sitting on one that the quality of its design has a significant impact on their health and wellbeing. Back pain anyone?

Yet another boon, at least in terms of its literary pulling power, is the unusually high degree of technology even in relatively unsophisticated office chairs. If you don’t believe me, just try to work out how to adjust one by reading the sort of incomprehensibly convoluted instruction manuals you’d expect to find on Space Shuttle Endeavour. Like sneakers, an office chair is an everyday object that has often been engineered out of all proportion to its size or function.

All of these elements make for a rattling design history, which Mr. Olivares tells with relish. He charts how the office chair developed from customized 19th-century contraptions like Darwin’s as the expansion of the office furniture market enabled manufacturers to invest in increasingly sophisticated technology. Though he is always at pains to contextualize the application of new materials and production processes by showing how their adoption was often driven by external factors, mostly economic pressures.

Take ergonomics, or making chairs more comfortable for the people who use them. It became fashionable among designers in the 1970s, but wasn’t embraced by major manufacturers until the 1980s when European safety regulations were tightened and the cost to U.S. companies of insuring themselves against employees’ legal claims rocketed. A similar set of financial considerations is now driving the efforts to develop sustainable office furniture.

Mr. Olivares attributes the rise of the “status symbol” chair in the 20th century to the popularity of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 theory of “scientific management.” By encouraging companies to adopt hierarchical structures, Taylor unwittingly prompted their employees, especially senior ones, to expect the cost and complexity of their chairs to reflect their rank. It took until 1994 for the U.S. manufacturer Herman Miller to usher in a more democratic era by introducing the Aeron chair, which was designed specifically for computer users, in one style, one color and three sizes, determined by body shape, not status.

The weakness of Mr. Olivares’s book is that, like the coffee table-crushers, it tends to concentrate on design successes, and ignores the failures that can also be influential. That’s a minor flaw compared to the strengths of a book, which interrogates its subject with such enthusiasm and vigor. You’ll never look at an office chair in quite the same way again.