over had seen his video. Judging Kenna without that additional
information is like making people choose between Pepsi and
Coke in a blind taste test.
4. “The Chair of Death”
Several years ago, the furniture maker Herman Miller, Inc.,
hired an industrial designer named Bill Stumpf to come up with
a new office chair. Stumpf had worked with Herman Miller
before, most notably on two previous chairs called the Ergon
and the Equa. Yet Stumpf wasn’t satisfied with his two previous
efforts. Both had sold well, but Stumpf thought that the Ergon
was clumsy — an immature effort. The Equa was better, but it
had since been copied by so many other firms that it no longer
seemed special to him. “The chairs I had done previously all
looked alike,” Stumpf says. “I wanted to come up with
something that looked different.” He called his new project the
Aeron, and the story of the Aeron illustrates a second, deeper
problem with trying to measure people’s reactions: it is hard for
us to explain our feelings about unfamiliar things.
Stumpf’s idea was to try to make the most ergonomically
correct chair imaginable. He had tried that with the Equa. But