Aeron by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick
A product designer’s job is equal parts scientist, engineer, archivist – their work, the result of years of research and tinkering, may start as one thing and turn into something completely different. No one knows this better than designers Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, who put in years of combined research into the way people sit. Their most well-known joint production is the Aeron Chair, an ergonomic revolution when it first hit the market in 1994, and now the gold standard for office seating today. But Aeron wasn’t invented out of thin air – Chadwick and Stumpf worked on a number of predecessors that assayed their ideas of elemental chair design. Here’s the Aeron journey, from prototype to industry pioneer.