I remember Orin talking me into buying a Herman Miller Aeron chair when we renovated the house a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It was very spendy but very nice, which was good luck because we couldn't actually get it into my office in one piece. My architecturally designed space with the ridonkulously difficult but aesthetically edgy entryway had to be built around it.
I was fine with that because the chair turned out to be worth the quids and close to indestructible. One day, many eons from now, alien archeologists will find it, sitting alone, unscratched, on a cracked concrete slab surrounded by the ruins of our civilisation.
You can imagine my disgruntlement then to hear from Bloomberg that an 'Aeron-killer' had hit the market. A "$1,072, 29-pound ergonomic beast named after the astronautic frontier called the Kármán line, the imaginary boundary 62 miles above sea level where the Earth’s atmosphere meets space and weightles".
The Karman, by Steelcase, is just one of many pretenders to office chair throne, that have attempted to unseat Herman Miller's design genius over the years.
To the untrained eye, Steelcase’s new chair looks a lot like the Aeron. But the company says you have to dig deeper—to the Karman’s more flexible frame, which, according to its marketing materials, “achieves perfect tension … fitting the contours of the body perfectly.” In other words, if your butt sags or your back feels stiff after a few hours of nesting in your current chair, it won’t in the Karman. This is thanks to its proprietary textile, Intermix, which is both springy and stable and can be woven with different colors, so the chair appears to change hue depending on the angle from which you view it.
This sounds very impressive until you read on to find out that "The Karman is also the latest in a long line of attempts by Steelcase to unseat its foe, including the Leap, Think, Amia, Gesture, Series 1, Amia Air and Series 2. This time, says Allan Smith, Americas president and chief product officer, Karman really is the horse to back."
"This time we mean it!"
We'll see, Mister Smith. We will see.