Remastered for today’s work and workers Lean, light, and responsiveas your own shadow Fewer parts, less material, and stilleverything a good chair should be Support you can see and feel Learn how original co-designer Don Chadwick and Herman Miller remastered the Aeron Chair. Made up of just six elements, the Plex family flexes on demand. Hear how Embody supports the research of ophthalmic neurobiologist Budd Tucker. Click on image to zoom Designer: Yves BéharInspired by suspension bridges—structures that deliver the most using the least material—Sayl's 3D Intelligent back lets you stretch and move, striking a healthy balance between support and freedom. The elastomer strands vary in thickness and tension to provide greater support along the spine where you need it most, and less everywhere else so you are free to move. Configure Your Sayl Chair Fewer parts, less material, and still everything a good chair should be Good design, healthy support, and exceptional value are always attractive—and Sayl delivers all three.
By using smart engineering to transform simple materials, we were able to make Sayl everything a good chair should be. Fewer parts and less material also mean a smaller environmental impact. Sayl designer Yves Béhar and our development team considered and reconsidered every part of the chair—and, in the end, created a better, smarter chair that sets the reference point in its class for quality, performance, and design. "Not defined by boundaries." The vertical and horizontal strands of Sayl’s 3D Intelligent suspension back provide passive PostureFit sacral support, which tilts your hips slightly forward to keep your spine in healthy alignment for improved posture and increased comfort. An Array of Options From an optional lumbar support that can be adjusted vertically to fit the natural curve of your spine to fully adjustable arms, you have a choice of options that let you outfit your Sayl chair to match your preferences. By applying the engineering principles of suspension bridges, designer Yves Béhar used less material in more inventive ways to provide ergonomic support for people up to 350 pounds (159 kg).
Also, Sayl contains no PVCs, and its materials are almost entirely recyclable. Sayl’s unframed back and Y-Tower support create a striking visual aesthetic that reveals both the designer’s inspiration and intent. An expressive color palette gives you plenty of options for personalizing your chair. You've been added to our mailing list. Please enter a valid email address Studies show people sit more than they sleep, so we've made it our mission to design the most comfortable ergonomic chairs on earth. Sit in one of our ergonomic chairs, and we're confident you'll experience proper support. You can also be kind to your body in other ways in addition to sitting in an ergonomic chair. We offer desks with a surface that moves with you from sitting to standing and keyboard trays that tilt and swivel, in addition to our ergonomic chairs.When Herman Miller rolled out the original Aeron Chair in 1994, it also launched a new paradigm in furniture design. Its designers, Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, built the Aeron according to what the body needs, not what the eye likes.
The result was a chair that looked more engineered than designed. It looked odd, at first—where were the cushions and upholstery?—but not for long. That same year, Paola Antonelli became MoMA’s design curator, and made the Aeron her first acquisition for the permanent collection. In Silicon Valley, especially, it quickly became a status symbol, visually synonymous with the optimism of the dot-com boom. For all its success, Herman Miller’s executives eventually started to think they could improve the chair. Today they say they have, with the newly remastered Aeron. Unveiled this morning at Herman Miller’s flagship store in New York, the new task chair is the culmination of two years of work, and an expression of two decades’ worth of accrued knowledge. “The chair is totally new, from the casters up,” says Chadwick, who worked on the redesign. (Stumpf passed away in 2006.) For the person sitting in the chair, all that newness should translate to a cushier seat. “It performs better,” Chadwick says.
“It provides this glove effect.” To the untrained eye, the new Aeron doesn’t look that all that different from its predecessor. “One of the concerns, originally, was we needed to preserve the iconography of the chair,” Chadwick says. “It has such a strong visual personality that there was reluctance to changing it very much.” The Aeron doesn’t have customers; Not wanting to abandon or confuse them, Herman Miller kept the shape and size of the original Aeron’s back frame. The real difference is in the chair’s mechanics. Consider the tilt function. CEO Brian Walker compares the tilt on a chair to the engine in a car—and an engine from 2016 will undoubtedly boast better performance than one from 1994. The tilt on the original Aeron works via a rubber coil spring that allows the chair to lean back when you do. But Chadwick says that spring comes with a slight lag, causing users to push backwards for a beat or two before the chair responds. The new leaf spring, adapted from the Herman Miller Mirra chair, is made of strips of glass-reinforced polystyrene resin that bend more responsively.
“It always follows you, it’s always in contact with the back,” Chadwick says. The second noteworthy update involves the membranous weave that stretches across the frame. Herman Miller calls it the pellicle, and Stumpf and Chadwick essentially invented it in the early ‘90s. The pellicle, more than anything, defines the Aeron. At the time of its release, most chairs had tufted, upholstered seats. The pellicle blatantly exposed the chair’s function, which was to support the back and regulate body temperature through breathability. Herman Miller says it’s now made 7.5 million pellicles—enough to realize how it could make a newer, more supportive one. The tensile strength of the updated “8Z Pellicle” varies across different zones (the original pellicle had a uniform tension) to create more nuanced posture support. “Just pushing on the lumbar isn’t that healthy of a behavior,” says Tom Niergarth, who led production at the new Aeron. “What you really want to do is get below the lumbar, where you can impact the pelvis.