Mirra Chairs

The five designers who make up the Berlin design firm Studio 7.5 consider themselves "the grandchildren of the Eameses." Like Charles and Ray, they are design pioneers who specialize in observing how workers interact with their environments and in finding ways to improve that interaction.

Claudia Plikat, Burkhard Schmitz, Nicolai Neubert, Carola Zwick, and Roland Zwick, the Studio 7.5 designers, prefer to work as a team without titles or hierarchy. They have been involved in designing products that improve how people work for more than a decade.

The group shares a genuine passion for one particular workplace element—seating. The Mirra chair is a product of their collective imagination, talent, and persistence. Perhaps most important, the chair evolved from their willingness to break the standard office chair mold. They envisioned a chair that reacts to what people do, so that a big part of their concept was a chair like a second skin, like a shadow of the sitter. From this concept, Mirra's passive adjustability was born. From the TriFlex back to the AireWeave seat suspension to the Harmonic tilt, Mirra does just what Studio 7.5 worked to achieve: Just sit on it, and it fits. There are only a few, highly intuitive adjustment controls.

Mirra features common materials applied in original ways, such as the elastomeric seat suspension and molded polymer back that replace the traditional foam and fabric. Studio 7.5 optimized the relationship between materials and technology to achieve maximum performance with minimal materials.

User testing, benchmarking, focus groups, tilt performance studies, and other research ensure that the chair meets customer needs and achieves advanced ergonomic performance. For example, research over the years has shown that the biggest concern that work chair users have is back support, and in fact, back issues account for the second highest number of work illnesses. The designers took this concern to heart and focused on the back as an area of differentiation.

Herman Miller and Studio 7.5 based Mirra's design on the Civilian American and European Surface Anthropometry Resource (CAESAR) study, which surveyed body measurements of people aged 18 to 65, using the latest 3-D technology. Data from the study—the first full-body, 3-D surface anthropometry survey of the U.S. and Europe—helped create a chair that fits people from the 5th percentile woman to the 95th percentile man.