Whether it’s an affordable work chair or a textile, we always approach design with a better world in mind.
Enter Gem, a new polyester upholstery fabric that is antimony-free, making it a good choice for the earth. Polyester is one of the world’s most popular polymers; unfortunately making it is harmful to the environment. Designing a better polyester meant replacing antimony, a heavy metal used as a catalyst, with titanium, a much more earth-friendly choice.
Gem is durable, inexpensive, and easy to take care of—and it’s part of Herman Miller’s quest for a Better World.
It looks beautiful when it’s from the hands of designer Yves Béhar. Who, with Herman Miller, set out to dispel the misconception that affordable meant offhand design and questionable quality.
Looking for affordability in innovation, Béhar and Herman Miller engineers spent months developing a unique suspension material for the backrest of SAYL. The resulting breakthrough molded ergonomic support directly into the back of the chair, which was then stretched into place. It also replaced foam and fabric, typical to other low-cost task chairs, with a single recyclable material. Less material and fewer manufacturing steps, all saved money. A point not lost on Spencer Bailey of Bloomberg Businessweek, who recently described SAYL as “An executive-quality perch that doesn’t require an executive’s bonus to buy.”
Designer Yves Bèhar isn’t kidding when he says, “Every molecule in the SAYL chair had to work harder.” To achieve Bèhar’s vision of an eco-dematerialized design, every piece of SAYL was examined, sculpted, and hollowed out to use the least amount of material without compromising strength. Was it successful? Well, SAYL survived having a 300-pound sack dropped on it—multiple times.
The Herman Test Lab, where SAYL was put through its paces, is infamous among our designers. Some have even dubbed it “the place where designs go to die.” Weights, pulleys, and pistons test every design to the brink of failure—and beyond—to ensure they meet the requirements of our standard 12-year warranty.
Engineers weren’t sure SAYL would make it. It did, thanks to some hard work making every piece work harder.
What do materials bring to a design? Most immediately, they bring pleasure.
It’s the materials of a space that give it resonance, according to Susan Lyons, Creative Director at Herman Miller. Material colors and textures “provide the experience when you walk into a room,” she says.
Lyons says there’s a sort of alchemy that happens when everything comes together: “the form, the touch, the use, the product works, it looks beautiful, it feels good, and life is good.”
Pleasure is one of five material design principles: honesty, utility, economy, pleasure, and possibility. Each is essential to good design.
This is the last segment in a series on our thoughts about materials—how we choose them, and what we think about when choosing them.
“We have to be incredibly mindful and purposeful with how we use our resources,” says Susan Lyons, Materials Creative Director at Herman Miller. This is a major idea behind sustainable design at Herman Miller—doing more with less material is a constant challenge, but one we’re passionate about. A great example: the Setu chair.
As Lyons explains, Setu’s Kinematic Spine, inspired by the chambered nautilus, uses “structure instead of mass” to create its strength and flexibility. And this sustainable innovation, designed by Studio 7.5, yields a lighter, ready-to-sit chair; with Setu, there’s nothing to tilt or tweak, just immediate comfort.
Economy is one of five material design principles: honesty, utility, economy, pleasure, and possibility.
Barry Sonnenfeld, director and Digital Man blogger, sits astride a wheeled saddle to scurry around film sets. Forget the clichéd canvas director’s chair, he cherishes his makeshift saddle-on-wheels, a creation of the Men in Black 2 crew that’s since been modified with “drawers for scripts, water, and prescription medication” for his sciatica.
Where he’s all about moving on the set, Billy Wilder, a director from an earlier generation who did films such as Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, opted for catnaps on set. In 1955, while filming The Spirit of St. Louis, he started taking naps on a narrow plank held up by sawhorses. Wilder later told his friends Charles and Ray Eames he needed something similar—but a bit more comfortable—for his office.
They came up with a slender, armless chaise with a built-in wakeup call. It required Wilder to lie on his back with his arms folded over his chest. Once he dozed off, his arms relaxed, dropped to his side, and gently awakened him. We began making the chaise in 1968, and it’s been in the line ever since.
We’ve added other pieces in the ensuing years. And Sonnenfeld puts three of them through their paces in his search for the right furniture for working in the editing room: the Embody and Aeron chairs and the Envelop desk. Get his read on them, and then check them out for yourself.
Photo: Barry Sonnenfeld is an Emmy-winning television director and the director of Get Shorty and the upcoming Men in Black 3.
As a Japanese-American in a time when the world was at war, Isamu Noguchi embraced both sides of his heritage culturally and artistically; because of this, it is fitting that Isamu means courage.
During World War II, Noguchi voluntarily entered a relocation camp for Japanese-Americans in Arizona as a protest against the camps—and then was unable to get permission to leave. After seven months, he was granted liberation. “I was finally free,” he said gratefully. “I resolved henceforth to be an artist only.”
Much had happened during his internment, including with Noguchi’s art. He discovered that someone had “borrowed” his design idea for a three-legged table. To Noguchi’s protests, the borrower replied, “Anybody can make a three-legged table.” Noguchi designed one as only he could, balancing a freeform glass top on a curved, solid wood base. The ethereal result has been in production since 1948.
Most widely known for his sculptures made from any and every material, Noguchi’s artistic experimentations were diverse: from baby monitors to stage sets, children’s playgrounds to fountains. “I like to think of my work as having some kind of relevance, no matter how abstract or how small or how big,” said Noguchi. “It has a voice which other people can hear.”
Solving problems through design is a core goal at Herman Miller. Because materials are an integral part of our designs, they can solve problems, too. In this segment, third in a series on Herman Miller materials design, Susan Lyons discusses the possibilities of materials and how they play a key role in problem-solving design.
“We spend a lot of time out and about, looking for materials that we may have no idea what we’re going to do with them,” says Lyons. Our job is then to ask, “How can we possibly begin to use this? What could we do with it? What could it turn into?”
The answers to these questions sometimes come naturally. “Nature is the most efficient designer,” she has said, and the best innovations already exist in nature. GreenShield, a sustainable nanotechnology textile finish, mimics the lotus leaf’s “micro-roughness,” repelling dirt and oil naturally. By experimenting with GreenShield and our own materials, we developed Quilty—a high performance textile that stays clean because of its design, not chemicals.
Possibility is one of five material design principles: honesty, utility, economy, pleasure, and possibility.
There’s an attitude at Herman Miller that’s been around for a long time: treating materials as something integral to the design process. Think of Charles and Ray Eames and their work with molding plywood for the origin. In this second in a series on materials at Herman Miller, Susan Lyons gives a recent example: the Embody chair.
Whatever the example, the point is the same: to achieve what Lyons calls “beautiful practicality.” “When we talk about material utility,” she says, “what we really mean is that we use materials to solve problems.” It’s a symbiotic relationship, with sometimes the material driving the form and other times the form driving the material.
Utility is one of five material design principles we live by: honesty, utility, economy, pleasure, and possibility.
What do a high-speed train and a nanotechnology textile finish have in common? They were inspired by Mother Nature’s 3.8 billion years of research and development. Increasingly, designers and engineers are looking to the systems, process, and models evolved by nature to fuel innovative problem-solving.
The aerodynamic shape of the kingfisher’s beak, for example, lets it catch fish with barely a splash. The same shape allows a Japanese bullet train to move at 200 mph with just a whisper, and 15 percent less energy.
For us, nature inspired Greenshield, a sustainable nanotechnology textile finish that naturally repels oil and water. By mimicking the “micro-roughness” of the lotus leaf—undetectable to the human touch—liquids roll off the surface, never having an opportunity to penetrate. The result is a Herman Miller fabric that is naturally antimicrobial, stain repellent, and easy to clean.
