Herman Miller has had endless notoriety and success with their Aeron Chair that was designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf back in 1994. Now, almost 25 years later, it seems they’ve struck gold again with their new Cosm Chair designed by Berlin-based design firm Studio 7.5. The designers spent eight years researching and developing the chair’s Auto-Harmonic Tilt systemwhich offers the user a self-adapting work seat for maximum comfort, which seems necessary if you think about how many hours we spend at our desk. If you’ve tested it out, you know. If you haven’t, run to your nearest store to take it for a test run because it could very well change your work game. If you want to learn more about it and how it came about, Studio 7.5’s Carola Zwick is graciously giving us an inside look into the design process now, in this month’s Deconstruction.
We didn’t want to make a chair again. Our idea was more to think about an experience, an experience of zero gravity. So the code name of the project was Flying Carpet. The idea was to be suspended, so you can fully focus and “forget gravity.” We also wanted to provide all of our knowledge about ergonomics and comfort, not in a mechanistic way, but in a way that is very down-played and comes without a visual burden, so to speak. Our desire was to incorporate as much as possible in a way that is tacit. You feel it, but you don’t have to actively look for it.