Office chairs are a scam | Locklin on science

Posted in Design by Scott Locklin on April 23, 2021

A younger self employed pal asked me if he should dump $2k on a Herman Miller Aeron recently. The TLDR is “no.” It’s like spending $2k on a pair of sneakers blessed by a devil worshipping blood-drinking pothead. Worse; unlike the $2k devil worshipping blood sneakers (which I suppose will eventually be mandatory for corporate dress codes), it’s become something that everyone unquestionably accepts.

Let’s do a little history here; there was a first office chair, and it existed for a reason. Originally it was because Charles Darwin had a giant room filled with biological specimens and he needed to flit from object to object to invent evolution. So he stuck some wheels on a comfy Victorian chair. I’ve used caster-chairs in laboratories for their intended purpose. They’re great and they exist for a reason. Thank you based Charles Darwin for inventing laboratory caster chair.

Later, such chairs were used as an integral part in early information technologies systems. Aka office workers with filing cabinets; yards and yards of filing cabinets, performing essentially the same functions done by a roughly equivalent volume of IT professionals and computer databases. The little casters on the bottom of the chair; that’s for flitting from cabinet to cabinet without getting up. They’re sort of like the actuator arms of the R/W head of magnetic spinney disk drives. The innovation in this era of office chair is they have a swivel mechanism, making it even easier to maneuver around, bring files back to your desk, and do clerical work with a typewriter and Marchant calculator. This also made total sense and it was both healthy and civilized having such aids to efficiency in offices.

At some point they put another joint in the things so self-important executives (who were actually glorified clerks: otherwise they’d have sat in stuffed armchairs) could sit in such a chair with their feet on the desk; this was never needed, but it was popular anyway. I inherited such a 50s era chair from a friend and kind of wish I had kept it going by bringing the metal parts to the machine shop, as it looked cool at least.

By the 70s, such chairs were pretty universal and made out of plastic. By then, information technology was an important factor, so swiveling and rolling past the filing cabinet was vastly less important. However physical decay and the workman’s comp lawsuit had become important factors in the workplace. People sued their employers for having a bad back. In reality, your bad back is some combination of genetic factors and poor maintenance. But whatever: this is when ergonomics became a factor in office chair design.

Now, the reality is, there is absolutely no such thing as “ergonomics.” Nobody who isn’t a 60s era fighter plane or space capsule designer, has any idea how to make a chair that is “ergonomic” -nobody really has any idea what “ergonomic” means in terms of office chairs. It’s just a sort of virtue word with vaguely medical connotations. Cargo cult science at its best, designed to ward off bad juju like lawsuits. This is where it started to go bad really quickly. Herman Miller who invented the office cubicle: the second most dystopian form of office, started producing “ergonomic” chairs festooned with gas-lift levers to alter the height, and lots of sliding doodads to move arm rests and knee flex points and so on.  The idea was based on factory/industrial designs. Cube farms are a sort of production line for clerical work. I’m pretty sure casters were completely irrelevant at this point, but since cube farms were all covered in filthy plastic carpet, and non-casters would ruin the shitty rugs, the casters stayed. Rotations same thing. And I guess you could still put your feet up in your smelly little carpeted cube.

Finally we come to the Herman Miller Aeron chair; the throne of the bugman open office. Add even more slidey “ergonomic” pieces. Because we’re doing “ergonomics” don’t you know. You can raise and lower the arms, cant the thing at all kinds of odd angles, roll around; it is endlessly ergonomic (whatever that means). Truly the Aeron chair is like the restaurant with 100 specialties on the menu; infinite choices for propping up your ridiculous clerical meatsack. Since by the 90s not  only were office workers completely gelatinous and in need of 10,000 adjustments to hold them in front of their computers against the ravages of gravity, they were also enormously fat sweathogs. The plastic carpeted cushions of Herman Miller’s Ergon gave way to a sort of polyester hammock-net so they wouldn’t develop grotesque sweat and fart stains on their office chairs and kakhis and cotton shirts. Something that was somehow missing when everyone wore wool and weren’t disgusting gelatinous ham planets. The chair itself, as a chair is, like most aspects of modernity, almost unspeakably ugly: it looks like some kind of arachnid or brine shrimp.

I came to the realization that office chairs are a scam when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis. Up until that point in life, I had spent most of my time as a free range physicist, bounding up and down vacuum chamber platforms, dashing to the machine shop, rolling the helium leak checker over and crawling over piles of conflat flanges; even practicing martial arts with the Filipino janitor who studied with Remy Presas. Suddenly though, I was strapped to a chair answering emails, doing Fortran, gnuplot and LaTeX all day; then goofing off by making fun of people on the internet. I actually developed mild carpal tunnel and a sore lower back. Since I worked for the government they sent a safety and ergonomics expert over who upgraded my chair from an Ergon looking thing to something more like an Aeron and gave me training and a new “ergonomic” keyboard. It very obviously didn’t help one whit. Moving to the LBNL physics library and sitting on hard wood and metal chairs from 50s Army offices helped some. Going back to the gym and lifting heavy objects cured it for all time. Your body isn’t a tub of shit when you exercise and so you can happily sit on a log or boulder and be just fine.

Best open office chair I had was one of those exercise balls; it kept my posture good and was way more comfy than any other kind of plastic chair could be. Plus it flexed on my coworkers who would get sore in the midsection if they attempted it. For my home-office; I mostly sit in tub chairs. It’s been right for 250+ years; peak chair.

The more “advanced” a chair gets, the more degenerate it is. If you train your body to decant itself into some arbitrary chair shape (with 1001 “ergonomic” positions) like a living jello mold or octopus hiding in a mayonnaise jar,  you will eventually inevitably experience back problems. This happens because despite your bugman lifestyle, you actually are a vertebrate. Look at how the spinal column is made; it’s not made to be held up by stupid chairs; all those little pointy deely boppers on your spine are muscle attachments. Those muscles are meant to never relax: they’re structural, just as much as the ligament, cartilage and bone in your spinal column. That’s why people with back problems do better sleeping on the floor rather than a waterbed.

The other thing that makes these things a scam; in addition to being made of materials which are both fragile and uncleanable (unlike, say, steel, wood, leather or even hard plastic) it is made up of numerous fragile parts which wear out and break. People own leather tub chairs for decades; assuming there is no plastic foam in them, for centuries even.

Literally all of this could be discerned if people paid attention or had the rudiments of common sense. Instead of using humble powers of observation, office drones have been brainwashed into uncritically accepting the claims of the vendors of these ridiculous contrivances. Instead of demanding a comfy tub chair and their own damn office, modern invertebrates accept the swindles of their bugman overlords, and feel important sitting in horrific open offices on their intricate, smelly and insubstantial $2000 plastic thrones. Anyway when you get back to the office after the covidiocy abates, tell them to sell the chair and give you an office with a regular chair in it; even a metal folding chair or a stool in your own office is an improvement. They won’t, because the chairs cost way less than urban commercial real estate, but that’s the future you should be aiming for anyway. At least as good as the one portrayed in Brazil.

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