Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (20 page)

In the early 1930s, Do/More appears to have appealed increasingly to comfort as well to health. It established a Posture Research Corporation (later Institute), under the nominal direction of a consulting physician, that developed fitting procedures and even calisthenics that could be performed while sitting in Do/More chairs. The Woodfield
Executive Chair had “special back construction [that] enables a user to take exercises in his office that will strengthen the abdominal muscles and help pull down any
waistline bulge.” The spring-loaded reclining function in its executive models was not new, but Posture Research literature glorified it with a silhouette of a male executive in upright and reclining positions against the background
of a muscular man operating a rowing machine. The arms and seat were more substantially padded. For the rank and file, Do/More offered Air-Duct Chairs with ventilated seats and backs. Thanks to this range, Do/More became a supplier to the U.S. government and the Bell Telephone System. Trained “posture specialists” working for the company’s distributors fitted each chair to the user and instructed
employees on proper sitting; Do/More literature insisted that individuals, who often had adapted their bodies to bad chairs, could not be trusted to follow their immediate sense of comfort. In fact, the ventilated Postur-Matic model was supposed to nudge occupants into uprightness. If the sitter slouched forward, his or her sit bones would encounter the discomfort of a recessed duct running across
the seat and the correct position would be restored. (Likewise, Frank Lloyd Wright defended the disconcerting three-legged chair he designed for the Johnson Wax headquarters in 1939 with the argument that its instability forced good posture. Wright eventually relented and helped add front legs. Workers in his Larkin Building of 1904 had called the seat’s predecessor the suicide chair.) Do/More
initially encouraged distributors to establish paid service agreements for cleaning and lubricating chairs twice a year. The New York distributor had, in addition to twelve salesmen, six full-time field mechanics.
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High-handed and even authoritarian as the system seems now, its appeal to scientific expertise sold chairs. The line was hierarchical, ranging from “factory” to “clerical,” “junior
executive,” “executive,” and ultimately “mediator,” a judge’s chair for top executives, later used by Harry Truman in the Oval Office. And the company gathered testimonials. In the New York City garment district, manufacturers reported reductions of back problems and unauthorized breaks. The secretary of State Farm Mutual Insurance Company wrote in 1939 to attribute its over 99 percent employee
attendance rate to the company’s 739 Do/More Chairs.
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Of course, there were other posture-conscious firms. A man named Charles E. Pipp offered a “Pep Chair” in 1921 with adjustments and features resembling the Do/More’s. The Gunlocke Company, which specialized in luxurious suites for top executives, introduced its Washington Series in 1923, and Evan S. Harter produced an Executive Posture Chair
in 1927, one of the first chairs with controls for synchronizing back and seat
reclining. But Do/More, as a newcomer, was most systematic in relating the technology of its chairs to the proper techniques of sitting. Its health campaign helped prepare for the postwar design renaissance.
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The metal shortages of World War II interrupted the refinement of office chair mechanisms; Do/More and no
doubt other companies were able to continue producing steel executive posture chairs only with medical
prescriptions. But indirectly the war had an immense influence. Steel was a mature technology, but defense work had helped industry metallurgists develop improved techniques of tubing, stamping, bending, and welding. And the war forced a new round of attention to human-machine interaction, from
aviation seating to the design of controls. Military sponsorship of human factors studies helped create a new cadre of professionals.
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Introduced in the 1920s and based on English industrial seating, the Do/More Chair was the first to be marketed nationally in the United States for its health and morale benefits. The line was extended upward to include more richly upholstered and imposing executive and managerial models. More recently, the Domore Company produced some of the first chairs especially made for air traffic controllers,
emergency service dispatchers, and other intensive users and is still an active supplier. (Courtesy of Lux Steel Inc.)

During the 1950s and 1960s, work chair design was demedicalized. Do/More continued its system, but it had new competitors with less physiological and more aesthetic goals. After a fifteen-year break in office construction, a building boom began, but the large corporate architectural
firms and their clients shunned the shop-floor culture of exposed metal of the 1920s and 1930s in favor of sculptural forms using not just metals but plastics developed during and after the war. Knoll International’s classics swept architects and clients off their feet: Eero Saarinen’s tulip chairs, Charles Pollock’s swivel armchair with its one-piece plastic shell, and above all Charles and
Ray Eames’s fiberglass series and their aluminum group became icons of the postwar years. As popular culture, medical thought, and etiquette books alike moved away from the full upright position of the interwar years, seating emphasized ease and flexibility, not support. Posture-enforcing technology was becoming passé. Niels Diffrient, who worked for Saarinen in the early 1950s and knew most of
the other star designers, recalls that none of them expressed interest in human factors. In a Knoll company history of the 1980s, Pollock described his executive chair of 1965 as built around its extruded-aluminum rim, observing that it has “no inner spine.… It doesn’t rust, it doesn’t tarnish, it doesn’t fade.” Even Do/More (now Domore) hired the influential designer Raymond Loewy to rejuvenate
the lines of its seating, though not to change the mechanism.
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Most of the celebrated 1950s and 1960s chairs departed from the old posture standards. The Pollock armchair lacked a lower-back support, and its shell enforced a rigid angle between back and seat. Gradually a new posture movement emerged, first identified as “human factors” and later as “ergonomics.” In
1967, air traffic controllers sat in rickety tubular-frame swivel chairs and leaned over tables to use horizontally mounted instruments. As part of a reform of their work conditions, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) tested dozens of chairs and issued a set of guidelines
for controller seating, governing everything from the backrest action to the shape and adjustment of the seat. Domore
won the competition to produce a new chair for every air traffic controller. These Domore chairs may have been the first major postwar line available in A, B, and C sizes for a single style. For Domore, the contract opened an important niche, round-the-clock seating. (The FAA still uses 16,000 Domore chairs.) And it also helped turn the attention of architects and their clients back to the health
side of seating. By the mid-1970s, the two largest office seating companies had posture chairs of their own: the Steelcase 430 Series (1974), derived
from aerospace human factors research, and the Herman Miller Ergon chair, based on time-lapse photographic studies by the designer, William Stumpf, at the University of Wisconsin. With its high back, body-fitting curves, comfortable edges, and ingeniously
placed armrests, the original Ergon helped make posture chic again—under the new aegis of ergonomics. It was the first chair to take full advantage of new foams and plastics to create a distinctive shape without compromising comfort or motion.
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The Aeron chair, the Leap chair, and the Freedom chair offer complementary features. The first (above) is celebrated for its cooling mesh and a deep, rocking recline motion. The second (facing page, top) has a seat pan that slides forward, separate upper- and lower-back controls, and a lumbar support that curves snugly. The third (facing page, bottom) needs minimal user adjustments and provides
an especially deep reclining position, and (as options) a synchronized headrest and an ottoman. The shared ideal is no single posture but promotion of healthy variation—especially reclining. (Courtesy of Herman Miller [photographer: Nick Merrick, of Hedrich Blessing], Steelcase, Inc., and Niels Diffrient)

Stumpf’s ideas on posture reflected a restless, experimental decade. The Tan-Sad and Domore generations had sold efficiency and productivity Stumpf doubted openly that the ergonomic design could boost office output by more than 1 percent at best. As
Progressive Architecture
put it in 1980, Stumpf recognized that “people sit right-side-up, sideways, and upside down as they please, lumbar support
or no.” His was the first U.S. chair to use a gas cylinder—a German invention—to regulate seat height and help cushion the shock of sitting down.
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Independently, other designers were pursuing similar goals. Niels Diffrient of Henry Dreyfuss Associates, who had worked with the early medical chair expert Dr. Janet Travell on airline and industrial seating, patented the first knee-tilt mechanism
that rotated the sitter’s body back and downward instead of tilting it where the center column met the seat-pan. Feet could now stay on the ground, making deep reclining more comfortable. After studying orthopedic and vascular health, the Argentine-born American polymath Emilio Ambasz and his Italian colleague Giancarlo Piretti introduced the Vertebra Seating System in 1978, a series of chairs with
ingeniously hinged backrests and spring-loaded sliding seats that encouraged relaxation. Their patented joints covered with butyl rubber bellows helped define a new high-technology look in chairs.
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Even as these chairs came to market, offices were changing. The rise of computing was putting terminals and keyboards on the desks of some managers and even executives. But pens, papers, and telephones
weren’t going away. The ideal chair would help the body through this growing range of activities, by positively encouraging changes of motion. The Cyborg chair, developed in Denmark by the designer Jacob Jensen and the ergonomist Vibeke Leschly had pneumatic cylinders for adjusting seat height, seat angle, and seat depth. But its greatest innovation was the seat angle cylinder, which automatically
and gradually changed the seat back position in response to variations in weight. Users were induced unconsciously to change the position of their spines through about four degrees
at the rate of about a degree a minute, so loads on muscles and vertebrae varied. By changing points of contact between chair and body, the Cyborg also promoted circulation and prevented muscle tissue malnutrition,
according to Rudd International, its U.S. manufacturer. Lifting the body’s weight, even by reaching for a pencil, reset the cylinder for a new cycle. The Cyborg chair went out of production quietly in the early 1990s, no doubt held back by its price of over $1,300. But it showed how much (and how little) attitudes toward body techniques had changed. Like the Domore Postur-Matic, it induced motion
gently. But while Domore had discouraged user adjustments and was designed to nudge the occupant back to a single optimal attitude, the Cyborg intentionally and subtly destabilized the sitter, as though symbolizing a shift from high modernism to postmodernity.
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