99% Invisible - 139- Edge of Your Seat

Episode Date: November 5, 2014

“A Chair is a difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” — Mies van der Rohe. The chair presents an interesting design challenge, because it is an object that disappears when in use. The person replaces the chair. So chairs need to … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. A chair is a difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. Those are the words of Mee's Van der Ra, one of many architects who have also designed chairs. Eames, Geary, Adeed, Leviscind, Kubusier, Breuer. If they've designed a big building, chances are they've designed a thing on which to set. And this makes sense that chairs would be signature design pieces for architects, because chairs are almost like teeny tiny buildings for one person. Producer, Avery, Trupplement.

And of course it's not just architects. Designers of all stripes have this love affair with chairs. Well, I think every designer really would love to design a chair. I mean, there's so many interesting things about chairs. This is designer Bruce Hanna. I'm a teacher at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and designed things for all for years. Including plenty of chairs for the office,

for the home, everything. Chairs exist. They kind of are like placeholders for human beings. You know, you go into a restaurant that's empty and there's all these little placeholders, you know. Yet when the people sit in the chair, it disappears. The person replaces the chair. And so there's this distinct challenge for chair designers. To make this thing look fantastic when empty and remain comfortably invisible when in use. And Hannah's pursuit of seating innovation actually led to something else. When he was experimenting with foam cushioning, Hannah accidentally invented the Nerf ball.

Well actually it's called the foam football. Still really cool. It did come out of designing the chair. I mean we're much more interested in the chair. Yes, those designers sure do love chairs. Love them. They keep turning out new ones all the chair. I mean, we're much more interested in the chair. Yes, those designers sure do love chairs. Love them. They keep turning out new ones all the time, which brings me to one of my favorite headlines from the onion. Quote, report confirms no need to make new chairs for the time being. Because yeah, there are already a lot. I think you could say that about anything.

Well, we have enough cars. Let's stop making cars. Personally, I wouldn't be against that, but new chairs are always coming out, Hannah says, to fit our ever-changing needs, because chairs determine how we use a space. Hannah brought up this great example of seating in cafes. Cafes used to be places for talking, and now they're places for working. So people are sitting and interacting differently.

And so the furniture evolves along with the space and the activities. Throughout our lives we have been told to sit down in school, in the office, in the plate company of a dinner party, in a car or a plane or a bus or a movie theater sitting is the default. We spend a lot of time in chairs. But I'm sure you heard all the talk lately about how unhealthy chairs are, especially if you listen to public radio, which I bet you do, you beautiful nerd. First we'll talk about chronic sitting. Are you sitting down? Well, you might want to stand up.

It turns out that sitting down can be bad for your health. And those who were sitting more were substantially more likely to die. Geez. I think I found like five articles with the headline, were sitting more, were substantially more likely to die. Geez. I think I found like five articles with the headline, sitting is the new smoking. The absolute number of hours that you sit is directly correlated with mortality from all causes.

Cancer, heart attack and stroke. And it doesn't matter how many hours you spend in the gym as compensation. This is Professor Galen Kranz. You come in and the secretary says, have a seat. She doesn't know, she's wishing you death. You know, it's a death wish. Ha ha!

This research, along with those scary headlines, has led to a new market for medicine ball chairs, adjustable chairs, standing desks, treadmill desks. The chair backlash is upon us. And Berkeley architecture professor Gaelin Kranz totally nailed it way before anyone else. Yes, yes, it is nice to that people are, you know, saying that I was prescient and I wasn't prescient.

Everybody else was just blind. In 1998, Kranz published a book called The Chair, rethinking culture, body, and design. And the argument of the chair is that we should stop sitting in chairs. At least we should stop sitting in them for so long. Up to three hours doesn't seem to have much consequence. But Professor Cran's takes innovative chair sitting to another level. I try to eliminate all conventional chairs in my own life.

Which presented a challenge when I went to go interview her? I wonder if let's see how should we sit. Professor Kranz's house was full of floor cushions to Tommy Mats and lots and lots of unconventional hybrid chairs, like a medicine ball on an office chair chassis and one that looked like a sleek, paired-down horse saddle. And when she's not in her home seating oasis and out in public, Professor Cran's does a lot of standing.

And instead of sitting when she gets tired, she opts to kneel or squat or lie down. I laid down in a bank and somebody came up and asked me if I was having a heart attack, which was kind of them. You know, I understand. But I said, no, I'm fine, I'm just resting because the line is so long. You've got to be gutsy to actually avoid the chairs everywhere.

So how did the rest of us get suckered into the seated position? Well, it all started when we got off the farm. In the 20th century, we moved from being an agricultural economy where most people worked on forms.. Then we moved into a manufacturing economy where a lot of people worked in factories and some sat, some stood to work the machines on the long-accombaire belts. Not to over romanticize life on the farm. They were still doing back breaking work. They just probably had better posture and less carpal tunnel syndrome. And then we moved into a service economy. And that seems to be where the chair really took off and became the dominant apparatus for our lives.

And then when we settled into the service economy, sitting became the way to type and file and fill out paperwork. You could do that standing, but for reasons I don't fully understand, we did it sitting. And so office chairs become the chairs, the chairs that people spend most of their day in. And until very recent history, they were not made to fit your body. They were made to fit your job. So you had to manage your real one, you had to middle manage your real one, you had a secretary of one, you had a task chair. Bruce Hanna had to design a few of these kinds of office chairs.

The status oriented chair design meant that in some cases. You had the 120 pound executive sitting in a gigantic chair because it really was about his presence when he wasn't there or her presence when he wasn't there. And then you had the 160 pound assistant secretary sitting in this tiny little chair. For the most part, status trumped organomics. And then along comes 1992, the the air on chair, where it's the same chair just comes in three sizes. It's a t-shirt. A small one, medium, one, and a big one. But everybody gets.

All of the adjustments, they get arms, they get everything they need to work. Because everyone is working equally hard in the office. The Herman Miller Aeron Chair. You've seen an Aeron Chair. It's got this mesh looking back. And you've probably heard it mentioned on public radio. You're beautiful nerd. Support for NPR comes from Sitver Life in Herman Miller, featuring the Aeron Chair,

including the True Black color. They're usually black, or true black. There's one of them everywhere. I was surprised when I walked into the studio today that you don't have a couple here, you know, because they're everywhere. They're ubiquitous. They're ubiquitous, chair. And the Aeron Chair brought on this age of ergonomic office chairs that look like little robots.

They display their technology as a selling point, and they show off their swivels and their adjustments and their ergonomic technology. The Aeron Chair defined what an office chair ought to look like. Right now, I think it's what society says that that will make me comfortable. That piece of machinery. And no one guessed that these expensive pieces of machinery would sell like hotcakes.

No one except Gaelin Grants. When my book first came out, people said, well, you know, nobody's going to pay for an ordinary clerk to have an adjustable chair with all the bells and whistles. Oh, that's way too expensive that'll never happen. Well, then there were repetitive strain injury in a whole lot of lawsuits, and insurance companies suddenly thought it was a lot cheaper to buy those fancy adjustable chairs than to pay for medical bills. Crans is a fan of what she calls body conscious design, and considers any chair that takes the human figure into account is a vast improvement over,

say, a beanbag chair. But Cran's argues that some of those bells and whistles on office chairs actually don't help that much, specifically those ergonomic chairbacks. Because in all likelihood, you are probably sitting in this chair while working at a desk. And the desk, it turns out, is the chair's devious accomplice. The true villain is the table. Flat surfaces force you to lean over, so you never really take advantage of the chair back. The chair in particular asks us to sit at this right angle position, but most of our work

is forward oriented. Clerical work, reading, writing checks, and eating even, or drinking tea and coffee, and all of everything's forward. So you bend forward, or more likely slump. Even if you have excellent posture, it's hard to avoid leaning over your keyboard or your dinner or your book. So the head gets seduced into coming forward, that when you curve your spine into the C shape, it's bad for the spine, of course, but it also compresses your organs, which is really bad, especially for hours on end throughout the day in an office chair. And because of this

horrible chair desk dynamic, chair designers can't solve much by adding ergonomic elements to the chairbacks. Actually, Professor Kranz thinks we should do away with back support entirely. I think back support is a big mistake and it's weakened our backs. If you support something, you're usually weak in it. So if you're in a situation where you must, must sit in the chair. Kranz says it's best to ignore the chair back and sit yourself right at the edge of your seat. Right out to the edge, that way you don't get seduced to using the chair back. If your own torso strength keeps you upright with this strategy of getting your sit bones out to the edge of the chair,

you're turning it into a stool. Stools, Kranz says, are a good alternative to chairs because they don't have back support and they get your body out of the C shape. It positions the body halfway between sitting and standing. And if you take that body position and lean it backwards, what do you get? A lounge chair. And that's how I'm positioned right now. Yeah, Gaelin Cran's was reclining any lounge chair for this interview. I'll be in the lounge, and I'll have you

in the rocking chair facing me. And she put me in a rocking chair, because unlike a normal chair, it allows for more fluidity and movement. And this all sounds great and healthy and fun. But in practice, I was sitting all the way forward, rocking right to the very front, stretching my microphone out to Krance,

who was lying back in her lounge chair. And it hurt. I just wanted two chairs and a flat desk to rest my arm on. But I don't know, maybe I just wasn't used to this alternative world yet. Maybe I need to get acclimated, I don't know. I mean, Professor Krance looked pretty comfortable in her lounge chair. Before people got so into standing desks and treadmill desks.

Professor Kranz was sure that lounge chairs and lounge chair desks would replace chair sitting. Of all the solutions to the seating problem, the lounge chair is the solution that requires the least physical effort while still supporting the human body in a healthy way. But it's not like there's one single piece of furniture that will correct all the problems of chair sitting.

No, lounge chair is not the answer. There's no the answer. What we need is variety. The best posture is the next posture. Bruce Hanna agrees. The more variation in your day, the better off. But he's not chair avoidant. Sitting is the new smoking? Really? We

should be up and running every day. Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run. Is that mean that all restaurants will be, will be running in place at restaurants? They'll be treadmills. Right? Will there, nothing be sacred? I like to sit. I want to sit down. And I deal space to live or to work could be full of unconventional mismatched chairs for you to try out and cycle through like in Galen Cranc's dining room. People say, oh, wow, you have a lot of chairs. I say, oh, yeah, it's a chair museum. And I say, oh, try, be sure to try them all. And people do. They like, they say, well, I've said in that one, can I go try that one and have way through the dinner, you know. The middle class thing is you want everything to match. And it's fun that these don't match. Everybody loves it, trying out all the different attitudes towards seating reform.

But the solution isn't just a like only in Berkeley kind of thing. So maybe in this one case, this one exception, the onion is wrong. We don't need fewer things to sit on. It turns out we need more. And all different kinds, stools, purchase, lounge chairs, and hell, throwing some desk redesigns while you're at it. Ones that rise up to meet us like drafting tables, design more, much, much more, bring me more chairs! All the chairs. 99% Invisible was Produced This Week by

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