straw hat was intriguing to me.” What he settled on was a
specially engineered, thin elastic mesh, stretched tight over the
plastic frame. If you looked through the mesh, you could see
the levers and mechanisms and hard plastic appendages which
were out in plain sight below the seat pan.
In Herman Miller’s years of working with consumers on
seating, they had found that when it comes to choosing office
chairs, most people automatically gravitate to the chair with the
most presumed status — something senatorial or thronelike,
with thick cushions and a high, imposing back. What was the
Aeron? It was the exact opposite: a slender, transparent
concoction of black plastic and odd protuberances and mesh
that looked like the exoskeleton of a giant prehistoric insect.
“Comfort in America is very much conditioned by La-Z-Boy
recliners,” says Stumpf. “In Germany, they joke about
Americans wanting too much padding in their car seats. We
have this fixation on softness. I always think of that glove that
Disney put on Mickey Mouse’s hand. If we saw his real claw, no
one would have liked him. What we were doing was running
counter to that idea of softness.”
In May of 1992, Herman Miller started doing what they call
use testing. They took prototypes of the Aeron to local