The Ultimate Office Chair.

(From Business Today (India))

Byline: Supriya Shrinate

Ah, this is the life. No, I am not in Goa, or the south of Australia, places writers across the hall from where I work-they work for a travel magazine-seem to be get sent to on assignments all the time. Still, I muse, as I revel a little more in the comfort of my immediate surroundings, things could be worse. It's the chair, you see: Aeron, by Herman Miller. Haven't heard of it? Well, you don't know what you are missing out on.

At my office-a swank one, more a foreign bank type than a media outfit one (there, that should mollify my editor)-I sit on a local unbranded office chair. It has castors, levers to adjust height and extent of lower lumbar support, and arm rests, but, alas, it is no Aeron. The chair I am sitting in right now, at Adobe India's Noida facility is something else. For starters, it does something to mind and body to know that the chair one is sitting in was a shoo-in for the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Then, there's the suspension: Pellicle mesh in an aluminum frame that accommodates all kinds of body types, allows for even distribution of weight, and facilitates ventilation (yup, your back needs air too, docs tell me). For those of you interested in such things, Pellicle was developed exclusively for use in the Aeron chair. And the structure: a high and wide-contoured back that supports the body and reduces the quantum of weight the lower spine needs to support; a custom-adjustable lower back; armrests that are independently height-adjustable and which pivot both in and out by several degrees; a super-smooth tilt mechanism; a tilt-range of five degrees to 112 degrees (for those times when you really want to lean back and put your feet up) and a permanent contact system that supports the preferred posture of the user at rest, and in motion.

There's more but surely, you get the picture? Designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf and launched by Herman Miller, a $1.5 billion office furniture major, as far back as 1994, Aeron won the Gold in idsa's Designs of the Decade competition for having a great business impact. Dotcommers loved it. So did just about everyone else. "Eight years ago," wrote LA Times writer Preston Lerner in a paean to Aeron in September 2002, "the office chair hierarchy was stood on its head by the introduction of Herman Miller's seminal Aeron chair, which set new standards for ergonomic efficiency while emerging as an I'm-so-cool icon... by merging the utility of task seating with the status of a throne, it forever changed ...