Blink

companies in western Michigan and had people sit in them for
at least half a day. In the beginning, the response was not
positive. Herman Miller asked people to rate the chair’s comfort
on a scale of 1 to 10 — where 10 is perfect, and at least 7.5 is
where you’d really love to be before you actually go to market
— and the early prototypes of the Aeron came in at around
4.75. As a gag, one of the Herman Miller staffers put a picture
of the chair on the mock-up cover of a supermarket tabloid,
with the headline chair of death: everyone who sits in it dies
and made it the cover of one of the early Aeron research
reports. People would look at the wiry frame and wonder if it
would hold them, and then look at the mesh and wonder if it
could ever be comfortable. “It’s very hard to get somebody to
sit on something that doesn’t look right,” says Rob Harvey, who
was Herman Miller’s senior vice president of research and
design at the time. “If you build a chair that has a wiry frame,
people’s perception is that it isn’t going to hold them. They get
very tentative about sitting in it. Seating is a very intimate kind
of thing. The body comes intimately into contact with a chair,
so there are a lot of visual cues like perceived temperature and
hardness that drive people’s perceptions.” But as Herman Miller
tinkered with the design, coming up with new and better