Quote · Modern Wisdom
The Health Crisis Of Office Jobs - Bob King - #1098
Where this was said
Do Men and Women Need Different Work Setups?
At 46:10 · chapter starts 45:10
Chris brings in the iconic US military anecdote: millions spent designing a fighter jet seat for the statistically average pilot produced a seat that fit none of the actual pilots — because nobody is perfectly average. Bob King connects this to the Liberty Chair story: he pushed Niels Diffrient to design a mesh chair to compete with the Aeron's dominance, and Diffrient's initial response was that mesh chairs are fundamentally flawed — you can't control the shape of stretch mesh, and the resulting lack of lumbar support means yet another adjustment control nobody will use. Diffrient's breakthrough was borrowing from clothing designers: use shaped panels of minimal-stretch, high-flex mesh so the material fills the hills and valleys of the sitter's back rather than stretching over them. The result is a chair back that takes on the exact shape of whoever is sitting in it — eliminating the concept of average from the design entirely.
There is no perfectly average human on earth, yet almost everything is designed for one. The further you are from average, the worse your experience with every product. Humanscale's solution: use the sitter's own body weight as the chair's calibration mechanism, adapting automatically to each individual.
