Designing the Steelcase Leap desk chair

What sort of engineering goes into designing a better office chair? SolidSmack talks to Steelcase about the four-year development of their Leap chair, involving various prototype chairs and eleven studies with hundreds of participants. (SolidSmack also recently interviewed the team behind the Herman Miller Embody.) [via Core77]

1. [technogeek]

   I’ve been involved in projects that involved some mechanical design for human factors — and cheap, adjustable mockups are definitely a useful tool for finding out what works and what doesn’t. The uncommon part is taking the time to actually study users rather than making assumptions.

   (I really wish more software developers would learn that lesson. I see entirely too much stuff designed around assumptions that work for the author but don’t match real-world usage, or that support one particular approach while actively getting in the way of any other…)

2. [pork musket]

   Totally off the topic but responding to technogeek:

   As a software developer, I can tell you it’s always a trade-off between a solution that works “out of the box” versus a solution that can be customized and configured to do and be exactly what you want. All of this makes the rather huge assumption that the codebase is stable, testable, and modular enough to allow for said customization.

   In commercial software you end up with the extremes: mainframe database software that can store any amount of any kind of data, but is not human readable at all and requires massive logic overhead to retrieve the data in usable form; on the other side, you get the phone with one button and one way to do everything that runs only software the makers allow to run.

   Compare MS Word to emacs – they are comparable in terms of what they do but entirely different in how they do it. In commercial software, it’s a balance, and how you solve the problem is largely dependent on who your audience is.

   Thankfully, unless you are dealing with extremely specific software, there are typically all kinds of choices out there and there’s a good chance you’ll find something you like. If not, you can always try to write something better, and maybe make a few bucks as a result.

3. [vetnoir]

   I didn’t know it until i looked at the article but my ass in currently ensconced in one of these chairs which were recently purchased as part of a office redecoration. It was interesting to read about how the chair was designed and what went into it. I will say that this is probably one of the most comfortable chairs I have had in an office. Not as nice as the Herman Miller that I liberated during the bankruptcy of a former employer, but it’s a close second.

4. [dculberson]

   I should really get a new desk chair – mine is beautiful but a but outdated ergonomically.

   I have this:

   http://www.circa50.com/hmsoftexec.jpg