This would have been Bill Stumpf’s 80th birthday. Knowing him as I did, I’m certain he would have smoked a cigar (or maybe two), mixed a martini, and celebrated with his friends and family. There would have been good jazz, good food, and lots of good laughs. For Stumpf, these seemingly simple rituals and pleasures amounted to something more. They were what make us human. All too well, he understood what makes us human—our successes and our failures. Stumpf railed against all the things in the world that are needlessly inhuman and, as a designer, looked for ways to remedy them. And that, in essence, begins the story of how he and Herman Miller created the world’s first ergonomic chair.

It’s hard to imagine today that before 1976 most office workers sat in primitive and uncomfortable chairs. That was the year Stumpf and Herman Miller introduced Ergon, and changed the world of office seating forever. It was a revolution that seemed to come out of nowhere, but its origins stemmed from an idea as old as humanity itself—comfort.

Stumpf’s explorations into comfort began in the early 1970s, when he came to work at Herman Miller Research Corporation under Robert Propst. However, he quickly chafed at corporate life and returned to Madison, Wisconsin, with Herman Miller’s blessing and financial support to explore ideas for a new kind of chair. He soon returned with the concept for Ergon.

Philosopher and writer William Gass defined comfort as the “lack of awareness,” and Stumpf latched onto this definition as a goal for what could be achieved through ergonomic design. But he extended comfort beyond the physical to the psychological and emotional. As a prelude to his first chair design for Herman Miller, Stumpf laid out the criteria for comfort, several of which have been reimagined by artist Mike Perry in the animation that accompanies this story. These ideas come from his Ergon concept book, and were key to his proposal outlining the world’s first chair designed with ergonomic performance as a criterion.

Stumpf’s comfort criteria have directly and indirectly informed every Herman Miller chair design since 1976—including Equa, Aeron, Mirra, Embody, and Sayl. The list evolved as Stumpf’s thinking evolved, and eventually grew to include 22 salient points. His detailed research and demanding views of what a design should do are as fresh and provocative today as they were four decades ago. His criteria—including the five animated here—continue to help us define and redefine high performance seating—with a balanced view of comfort, function, and aesthetics.

Written by: Clark Malcolm

Video by: Mike Perry