We approach every project as an opportunity to improve people’s lives in tangible and significant ways. It was no different when our Milan team set out to design the new “Acuity” chair for Allsteel, three years ago.

This was the first time that Continuum was involved in designing an office seating project, so we came to it with a fresh perspective. A few months into the project, we identified some significant opportunities to improve the user experience—in general we found that most Task Chairs were complicated and did not provide the user a seemless experience on various levels. Users had a number of concerns: they often found the chair initially uncomfortable to sit on and the seating controls (under the seat) difficult to locate and operate. As our research revealed, the chair felt uncomfortable initially, because it didn’t automatically adapt to each user’s personal body mass, build and intended work activity.

So, the big idea was to create a new chair that embodied EASE of ACCESS and COMFORT… with the help of intuitive adaptive ergonomics. Foremost, we focused on designing a chair that automatically adjusts to each individual body type (taking advantage of the user’s body mass as the key component in the kinetic system) to facilitate the chairs ability to immediately fit and function correctly for the widest variety of physical builds and work activities. Likewise, we chose to limit the number of controls and designed them to be completely accessible and to operate intuitively, so as to allow the user to easily fine-tune the chair to support the specific task at hand.

The second big opportunity was to design an aesthetically pleasing chair that would
also have excellent mechanical or technical quality. Thus, our team focused from day one on creating an elegant, graceful design, which could be tailored to fit in to and compliment any work environment–at home, in an open office (more modern) or closed office space (more traditional).

The end result is a chair that immediately looks approachable, comfortable, and easily adjustable and which flawlessly delivers on these visual cues and expectations.

Filed under: Design