Chairs are for sitting on. It sounds obvious, but there are designers who seem to miss that point. Not Don Chadwick, however, who has developed some of the best chairs on the market, including the Aeron chair whose loyal users wouldn't sit in anything else. Chadwick's chair design emphasizes the body and the fact that bodies move.
Chadwick calls his hands-on studio in Santa Monica an "experimental lab," one that contains the workman's apparatus of saws, grinders, lathes, drill presses and vises. It is not a place where design takes place by computer, by number or hypothesis. "The only way to be sure a chair is comfortable is to actually sit in it and make changes along the way," Chadwick says. "A computer can't deal with the subtleties of chair design. It's too complex." Read more >