Gavriel is an aspiring games developer and programmer, a pursuit that comes with all the health problems you expect from someone who spends his waking hours typing alien symbols into a computer. “I used to sit ten hours a day,” he says from his home in Quebec.
After spending far too many days hunched over at his desk, he decided to treat his derriere to an ergonomically designed chair in an attempt to “avoid any serious back problems that may come in the future.” After consulting Reddit, and wading through almost 400 comments of ergonomic advice, he opted for an IKEA Markus. “The chair was painful at first as my back posture was so bad,” he remembers. “However, after a few weeks, I got used to it and a lot of my back pains and problems were significantly reduced. I’ll never regret this purchase.”
Gavriel is just one of many posture conscious consumers praising the benefits of ergonomically designed chairs, a relatively modern phenomenon. Walk into any office and you’ll find staff tapping away on 'smart' chairs that vibrate if you're sat in uncomfortable positions or kneeling chairs that bend your legs into a pretzel and claim to boost lumbar curvature and improve workplace concentration. The ErgoErgo stool is akin to sitting on a giant slinky, while standing desks make you ditch the chair altogether. Some products cost a few hundred pounds, others the price of a car.
Today, hundreds of posture products on the market claim to have invented revolutionary new ways of sitting, and business is booming. Since 2014, the ergonomic chair market has grown year on year, and standing desks alone are expected to become a $2.8 billion (£2.18bn) global market by 2025, Credence Research estimates.
For the Oslo design company Varier, a chair is far more than just a place to park your butt. “When we work on new designs today, we try to keep a somewhat rebellious attitude,” says Leif Holst-Liæker, the CEO of the company. Varier has been experimenting with the humble chair since 1979, and their designs are as elaborate as their names suggest. The Ekstrem, one of Varier’s flagship products, is a self-described ‘no-limit sitting experience’ that resembles a comfy scorpion made from 90 per cent wool and ten per cent polyester, while the appropriately named Thatsit balans is similar to a rocking chair that reclines in several ways.
“We don’t try to dictate how people should or should not sit, because there is no such thing as the perfect posture or position,” Holst-Liæker goes on to say. “We strive to redefine the norm of the chair as a static object, and make chairs that invite us to move when we sit.”
“A modern task chair is a very difficult thing to design in its own right, however we are rethinking the way humans and and their work environment interact,” says Che Voigt, CEO of the American design company Altwork. The Altwork station is the product of over 80,000 hours of research and engineering time, and is a combined desk, chair, reclining bed and monitor stand similar to a hi-tech dentist’s chair.
It comes with a hefty price tag – almost £6,000 for a basic model – but Voigt believes this is a small price to pay for ultimate office comfort. “Posture and health are a big deal to a lot of people, and so they should be,” says Voigt. “[But] most people use a high quality desk and chair for over ten years. Ask yourself: is your health and comfort worth £0.30 an hour?”
Today’s ergonomic dominance in the workplace was triggered like many other breakthroughs have: through war. After the Second World War, the social idea of mental health started to change as soldiers returned with shellshock. These new understandings was taken into account when designing workplaces.
This evolved through the 1950s through names like Herman Miller and the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, who catered to increased public demand for products that considered their health. When computers became widespread in the office from the 1980s it was quickly recognised that slouching for eight hours a day was causing physical health problems, and chairs were one of the easy fixes to make this a better for workers.
“You could say that the modern ergonomic furniture represents different kinds of ideas of the modern worker,” says Virve Peteri. As Academy Research Fellow at Tampere University, Finland, Peteri authored the paper ‘Bad Enough Ergonomics: A Case Study of an Office Chair’, analysing ergonomics as a social and cultural phenomenon. “It [ergonomics] represents the idea that if we do not take care of the working body, our minds do not work. They also represent the idea that office work demands time for thinking and concentration, but this is in conflict with the present day ideas that the ideal office worker is constantly communicating with others and moving in and through different spaces,” he said.
Over time, chairs became something that exemplified workplace status. Designed in 1994, the Herman Miller Aeron chair has become the most famous office chair in history, and one of the best-selling. It also became known as the ‘dotcom throne’, described by Fast Company as a chair “perfectly tailored to Silicon Valley’s vanities” that immediately became a status symbol for the 2020 billionaire class before they ruled the world. In 2005, it even achieved the height of pop culture validation as a reference in a 2005 episode of The Simpsons – in ‘Thank God, It’s Doomsday’, god sits atop a Aeron chair.
But do these posture products work?A 2019 study from the University of Pittsburgh suggests that sit-stand desks can help decrease blood pressure in small amounts or lower back pain relief, and that “certain populations might benefit greatly from even a small change in their health.” Other experts, such as Robert Shmerling, Faculty Editor at Harvard Health Publishing, advises that more research must be done before accepting these products as the miracle cure they’re sometimes advertised to be.
That said, any benefits are reserved for those who can afford the increasingly hefty price tag. Total Jobs claims that the average call centre wage is £23,000, an industry that employs around 1.3 million people in the UK. It’s safe to assume that not many of those people can spend a tenth of their wage on an office chair.
“Chairs have long had symbolic meaning of power and as reflections of who you are, where you are and the enforcing of work hierarchies," says Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, assistant professor of design history at Purdue University, Indiana. "And the history of ergonomic chairs is very gendered," she continues, explaining how many companies have adopted a one size fits all approach to chair design.
In 2019, Kaufmann-Buhler authored the paper ‘If the Chair Fits: Sexism in American Office Furniture Design’, which reinforced the idea that design and innovation is largely done so through an able-bodied males notion of comfort. She argued that chairs reflect and reproduce gendered differences, writing that “the large executive chair with its wide square seat [...] suggests a large male body working behind the executive desk, and the small seat and floating back of the secretarial chair suggests the presence of a petite female body perched on the seat.”
"Different workers' bodies are valued differently,” Kaufmann-Buhler explains. “And they are treated as important or unimportant depending on where they are.”
In some way, companies like Altwork are attempting to rectify this, but until there is one universal way to sit expect your office chairs to continue becoming increasingly complicated. “When we imagine traditional office spaces we conjure up images of perfect people sitting at organised, clean desks with perfect posture,” says Voigt. “That is just not true.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
