Chair Apparent

I attended the launch of the new Knoll Generation chair at the Knoll showroom in Santa Monica last week. Knoll CEO Andrew Cogan was in attendance along with about 2-300 members of the LA design community. There's an overabundance of mesh chairs on the market aimed at the Aeron, originally designed for Herman Miller in 1994 by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf, but the high performance elastomer net back, surprising multidirectional flexibility, dynamic suspension control of the Generation makes it unique. The Aeron is unique and adjustable but generally prescribes a single way of sitting. The Generation challenges the notion of correct work posture and posits that there are multiple ways of sitting that we all use. Still the presence of dated looking padded seat cushion seems disappointing and its questionnable whether the Generation has the same iconic quality of the Aeron. Will Malcolm Gladwell choose to write about the Generation in his follow-up to Blink? We may have to keep looking.