Industrial design Archives

Innovation and Expression: Why Designers Love Chairs So Much

Few objects in the world of design hold the allure and fascination of the chair. It’s a product that has been reimagined countless times by designers across generations and yet, designers never seem to get tired of it. No matter how many chairs get designed, designers return to the challenge of the chair again and again. As a design challenge, the chair has the capacity to blend art, technology, and human-centered functionality into a single, everyday object. This Insight article explores why designers love chairs so much, outlining how the chair is a prime platform for innovation in materials and technology as well as a vehicle for personal expression, with a rich tradition of modeling new design ideas.

Eames 1946 LCW chair — *The 1946 LCW Chair by Ray and Charles Eames.*

A Tradition of Innovation

Chairs aren’t just practical objects; they are design icons that have continually pushed the boundaries of what’s possible. The molded plywood chairs by Ray and Charles Eames were proof-of-concept products that demonstrated the incalculable value of the plywood molding technology, which added strength and versatility to the previously overlooked material. In 1859, Michael Thonet revolutionized production with his Era chairs, the first chairs made of solid bent wood, a modular design that was efficient to produce and populated cafes all over Vienna, and then all over the world. Chairs have often led the way in material and manufacturing innovation, and served as a vehicle for showcasing a fresh approach to an existing material, or a pioneering approach to a novel material.

These iconic innovative designs set the stage for generations of designers to follow, challenging them to rethink both the form and function of the chair. It’s no surprise that many of the world’s most iconic designs are chairs, which have not only defined the spaces they inhabit but have also shaped broader design movements. There is a long design tradition of the chair leading the pack, serving as the ideal model for a new aesthetic or manufacturing technique.

1859 Thonet Era Chair — *The 1859 Era Chair by Michael Thonet.*

Balancing Form, Function, and Innovation

Designing a chair is about more than aesthetics; it’s about problem-solving. A chair must be comfortable, structurally sound, and versatile enough to serve different purposes and users. At the same time, provided it will hold a person, and perhaps even this is not required for some concept chairs, the parameters are wide open. This combination of complexity and fluidity makes it a perfect canvas for innovation and play. Chairs are a unique product that interacts directly with the human body, requiring a precise blend of form and function. Achieving this balance is a designer’s ultimate challenge, but it’s also a key driver of design breakthroughs. Chairs force designers to think critically about ergonomics, proportions, and engineering, all while maintaining artistic vision and preserving artistic freedom.

Pioneering New Materials

One of the most exciting aspects of chair design is the opportunity to experiment with new materials. Over the years, designers have worked with everything from bent wood (Thonet) and tubular steel to cutting-edge composites, plastic polymers, and even recycled materials.

Marcel Breuer’s 1925 Wassily chair was the first bent tubular steel chair design and remains a classic, highly popular today. It breaks a classic club chair down to the absolute essential form and the modular design can be seamlessly assembled on an industrial scale.

Philippe Starck’s injection-molded Louis Ghost Chair was one of the first to show how polycarbonate could be used to create transparent, durable, and lightweight furniture, changing the way designers think about both materiality and sustainability. Like Breuer, he was playing on a traditional chair design that everyone would recognize, the ornate 18th century chairs of King Louis XVI. New materials like carbon fiber and bio-based plastics have also paved the way for more sustainable and lightweight chair designs, addressing environmental concerns while pushing aesthetic boundaries.

*The 1925 Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer.*

Technological Innovation in Chair Design

Technological advancements are also transforming the way chairs are designed and produced. CNC cutting, 3D printing, and robotic manufacturing have enabled designers to explore previously unimaginable forms. These technologies reduce waste and allow for more precise, customized designs.

The Master’s Chair by Philippe Starck, for example, uses injection-molding technology to fuse together the outlines of three iconic chairs into a single, seamless piece, paying homage to three masterful designs: Arne Jacobsen’s “Serie 7” chair, Eero Saarinen’s “Tulip Armchair” and Charles Eames’ “Eiffel Chair”. Similarly, the elegantly molded Diamond Chair by Harry Bertoia exemplifies how industrial manufacturing techniques can be applied to create intricate, sculptural forms.

*The 1952 Diamond Chair by Harry Bertoia.*

Chairs as Personal Narratives

Chairs are much more than objects of utility. They are reflections of the designers who create them, often embodying their personal stories, values, and design ethos. For many designers, creating a chair is akin to writing a personal narrative.

The iconic Egg Chair by Arne Jacobsen, for instance, was not just a modernist response to form and function. It also reflected Jacobsen’s desire to create a sense of comfort and enclosure in an increasingly fast-paced world. It was designed for the reception areas of the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen in 1958, created to provide a sense of privacy in public spaces. Each curve and contour (or the absolute absence of curves and contours!) of a chair tells a story about the designer’s worldview and creative journey. Chairs are not only functional solutions, they are the cumulation of hundreds of aesthetic decisions made by the designer, and walk the line between art and design.

For designers, a chair is a blank canvas, ready to be filled with their unique artistic voice. The simplicity of its form offers endless possibilities for experimentation. Whether it’s playing with organic shapes, bold colors, or unconventional materials, chair design allows for unfiltered creative expression. In the case of the Wiggle Chair by Frank Gehry, the use of layered cardboard wasn’t just a material choice—it was a statement about impermanence, sustainability, and the rejection of traditional materials. The chair’s playful, fluid form echoed Gehry’s architectural style, bridging the gap between furniture and art.

Small Object, Big Impact

So why do designers love chairs? Despite their compact size, chairs often act as catalysts for larger design trends. They allow designers to experiment with new ideas on a manageable scale. Success in chair design can reverberate across the design world, influencing everything from architecture to product design. We suspect that chairs will always be a designer’s dream object. They invite endless opportunities for innovation. Whether it’s through new materials, manufacturing techniques, or technological advancements, the humble chair has repeatedly redefined the possibilities of design. And as technology continues to evolve, so too will the chair—pushing the boundaries of what we think is possible in design, all while remaining a functional part of everyday life.

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Design History Series N. 020

Eileen Gray and the Bibendum Chair

In our Design History Series we highlight iconic women in design history and their innovative work. The historic contributions of women to design are many, and we aim to increase the awareness of these contributions in order to counteract a general trend of underrepresentation. In this issue we celebrate Eileen Gray, an Irish designer and architect who transformed the principles of modern design.

Interior Decadence

Eileen Gray, born in Ireland in 1878, was a pioneering figure in modern design. She studied fine art before undertaking an apprenticeship in a London lacquer workshop. Gray moved to Paris and swiftly established herself as a leading designer of lacquered screens and decorative panels. Her interior design style was modern and decadent, featuring luxurious, theatrical touches and unexpected materials. Gray exhibited chrome, steel tube, and glass furniture in 1925, well ahead of her design contemporaries Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer.

At 46 Gray took up architecture, where her style embodied avant-garde modernism, departing from the rigid rationality of architectural contemporaries like Le Corbusier. Gray’s approach to modernism prioritized lived experiences, featuring personal, bespoke touches that spoke directly to the needs of the client. Like Charlotte Perriand, she felt that architecture and furnishings should be developed in tandem to create a harmonious home.

Totally Tubular

One of her iconic creations is the Bibendum Chair, a timeless classic from the 1920s. Designed specifically for lounging and socializing, the Bibendum Chair features a distinctive back and armrests composed of two semi-circular, padded tubes encased in black leather. The name “Bibendum” was inspired by the Michelin Man, a character of stacked tires created by French artist Marius Rossillon. The chair was commissioned by French hat designer Madame Mathieu Lévy, for whom Gray redesigned an apartment in Paris. The Bibendum Chair, along with other furnishings, rugs, and lamps, became a highlight of the project.

Constructed with a polished, chromium-plated stainless steel tube frame—a groundbreaking material at the time—the Bibendum Chair was unusually large. The frame featured beechwood and rubber webbing for added comfort. Gray intentionally opted for plain coverings to maintain a simple aesthetic, complementing the bold art that shared the space. The success of the design instilled confidence in Gray, prompting her to open her own gallery in 1922. The Bibendum Chair would go on to be featured in a number of Gray’s interior projects.

The Bibendum Chair marked a departure from Gray’s earlier traditional work, aligning with the modernist movement. The Bibendum Chair continues to be celebrated as a design classic though, during Gray’s lifetime, her success was modest. Her legacy was overshadowed by Le Corbusier, who famously painted murals in the nude all over E-1027, a brilliant house designed by Gray with which he was obsessed and which was often misattributed to him (and in front of which he drowned). Only in her nineties did Gray receive international acclaim for her contributions to architecture and design. She passed away in Paris in 1976, leaving behind a legacy of innovation and timeless design.

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A Q&A with Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part II

A Q&A with Iconic Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part II

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers as an educator and career designer, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with legendary industrial designer Bruce Hannah. We had such a wonderful conversation that we split the interview into two parts. Be sure to check out Part I!

Bruce Hannah is a renowned American industrial designer celebrated for his innovative and practical approach to design. A graduate of Pratt Institute in 1963, Hannah’s career blossomed through his collaboration with Andrew Morrison, resulting in groundbreaking furniture designs for Knoll International in the 1970s. Establishing his own design office in 1976, Hannah continued to create award-winning products, including the acclaimed Hannah Desk System, recognized as a “Design of the Decade” by the Industrial Designers Society of America in 1990. He joined the Pratt faculty in 1993 and has received numerous accolades for his teaching and thought leadership. Hannah’s influential work includes co-curating the “Unlimited By Design” exhibition and authoring notable books on design, underscoring his profound impact on the field. In Part II, we spoke to him about activities that influence his creative process, the project he’s most proud of, and the key lessons designs students need to know today.

Portrait of Industrial Designer Bruce Hannah — *Photo courtesy of Bruce Hannah.*

Q: What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of design that influence your creative process?

A: I like to cut the lawn. I’m not strong enough to do that anymore but I found a lovely guy to do it and that’s fine. I like doing work. I like physical work. And fishing. I love fishing! My grandfather taught me how to fish, and my father used to take me fishing. Fishing has always fascinated me. I taught a class called Fishing for Ideas. I took students fishing! That started because I realized that, in this one class, almost no one had had that experience. So I took them fishing. We would go at the end of February, and we would go fishing for trout in the snow. Now if you can get more poetic than that as an experience, I’m not sure. Then of course you leave and you go to Denny’s and have lunch. You have this insanity of being totally immersed in something, because we were fishing fly rods. None of them knew how to fish with fly rods and I found this wonderful man, Mark Melanowski, who was a retired fireman who knew more about theology and bugs than most scientists. He was wonderful. I would bring a bunch of my fly rods, he would bring his, and they would all go fly fishing. Fly fishing is all about understanding what the fish are eating. Just putting a worm on there? No. What you’re doing is studying hatches of insects. As the hatch progresses the insects change. They may all start out black, little black gnats, but the next week they’re black gnats with little white wings, and the next week is black gnats with little white wings and a red tail. It’s nuts, but the fish know. If you’re in the third week and you throw them a black fly, they’re like, Yeah, we saw that one. We already saw that movie. Show us a new movie. So there’s this wonderful thing about designing fishing equipment where you have two customers, which is very unusual. You have to sell the fisherman, and then you have to sell the fish.

My biggest thing I like to do is wander around. Andy and I learned how to do that. It’s something that people don’t do well. People like to know where they’re going. They like getting on the plane to Las Vegas and getting off, and knowing exactly what they’re doing when they get to Las Vegas. There are very few people that you can wander around with and bump into things, and Andy was one of those people. We spent an inordinate amount of time wandering around New York City doing nothing.

The other part of our philosophy was: Try to do nothing. Which is hard. I would teach my students that. They were confused, Do nothing? That’s the opposite of what we’ve paying money to do here. I said, Doing nothing is the most successful thing you can do, because that’s when something will happen in your brain that you don’t expect. If you lead a very regimented life and know where you’re going all the time, you’re not going to see anything new. You’re not going to be startled. So one of the things I try to do is wander around, which is fun. My wife and I have done that. We’ll be on a super train in Italy and get off at a random stop. We have no idea where we are. Find a hotel. We are more like that as human beings. We are explorers. It’s hard to explore now because they’ve got all the signs up already. Oh, we’re at Exit 4.

Q: Could you tell us about a project or piece you are especially proud of and why?

A: Unlimited by Design an exhibit that My wife and I did at the Cooper Hewitt National design Museum. about accessibility for everyone. That was a long time in the making. It started out because I met this guy George Covington. He is a blind photographer. Let that sink it a little bit. George takes pictures to see. He was born legally blind in the early 40s, so he’s my age. His mom said no, he’s going to regular school. He ended up going to college to study journalism, and got a law degree. He ended up working at the National Park Service. He was in charge of accessibility there, making sure that things were accessible, which at the time they were not. George, with these black cowboy boots and white cane, banged on doors in the Senate and the House Representatives to get the American Disabilities Act through. George and I had this wonderful, funny relationship. We wrote a book together called Access by Design which was about making everything accessible for everyone all the time. And then we put on a conference in 1992 called Access to Daily Living, the first international conference on accessibility. All of this is tied into trying to figure out how to make the world accessible to everyone.

We worked with Diane Pilgrim to create the exhibit, who had MS and was in a wheelchair, and was the director of design at the Cooper Hewitt. There were lots of great products in the exhibit, and it was fully accessible. There was an accessible playground in the museum, which the lawyers went crazy over. Everyone wanted to play on that playground. We tried to redefine design, for all. I’m very proud of that. I wish I had paid more attention and gotten a book made of it. I think that would have been important. As we seem to do with everything that is good in the world, we take two steps forward and I think we’re going into the one step back phase at this point. Although I’m constantly surprised at how much more accessible New York City is today than it was 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.

Q: You are also a design educator. What key lessons do you think design students should keep in mind right now?

A: They have never changed. What’s important now is the same sh*t that was important to the Egyptians. I’m involved with City Tech, which is the City University of New York’s design and architecture thing. It’s in Brooklyn. I got roped into it by a student of mine, Jenny, who said last August, Bruce, would you mind teaching an introductory class to industrial design students? So I went in. These are New York City kids, working and going to school. It’s in the mechanical engineering department. After three weeks I fell in love with them because I commuted to Pratt from Staten Island two hours each way for four years. That was not unusual. And these kids do it and they work. Half of them come late to class because they got out of work late or the trains broke or whatever, right? And then the guy that hired me, Andy Zang, said, We’ve been working on this new curriculum. Would you be interested? So we’re developing a four-year industrial design program. We’ve written 20 or so class outlines and syllabuses. It’s very different from when Kowstellow invented design education. There are so many people in charge of so many things. It’s frightening.

So the list is exactly the same. What should you teach kids? The first thing you would teach any college student is to trust themselves. It has nothing to do with skills. It has nothing to do with anything else. If they can’t trust their own intuition, we’re in deep number two. Learn how to sketch. I don’t care what you sketch with. I do not have this. I do not think that there’s a specific tool or specific paper that will make your idea better. Use an old newspaper and an old pencil that you found on the floor. As long as you can sketch out the idea so that somebody else can understand it, it’s pretty good. Same with 3D. Figure out how to teach them how to make stuff three-dimensionally. As we have little money at City Tech, I based my whole class on eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper and anything we could do with it. You can buy a ream of paper, which is 250 sheets of paper, for six dollars and it’s the cheapest material you can buy. And if you limit them to it, you cannot lose. You eliminate the glue. So we make a lot of stuff out of eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper. It’s cheap and it’s disposable. The first exercise I give them is to design a paper airplane. Everybody can do it. The cool thing is: then you ask them to write down the steps. And they go, I can’t do that. I say, You have to write the steps down. And they realize that their brain will explode into a purple cloud, because you have to learn to do that from somebody else. This is my introduction: You will learn how to make 3D things by making 3D things. There’s no manual for this. The act of doing is another thing that you have to instill in students.

So now they’re drawing things, sketching things, and they’re making things. The other thing is that they have to figure out how to tell you what they’ve just done. That’s the other thing that’s important. We have a lot of people that have good ideas, but they’re terrified of telling anybody, for some reason. Psychologists can go into that for the next thousand years. You need to make them stand up in front of the class and tell you how they made their airplane.

Those are the four essential skills. Everything else, computers, whatever, we’ve all had to learn different things. I had to learn how to draw on mylar, with ink. Insane. You think computers are hard? Try not to smudge that drawing. It’s all hard. All of those skill things are hard, but design is really about communicating your ideas. Get them out of your head, put them on a piece of paper, and have the courage to stand up in front of a bunch of people and say, Well this is what I think. What do you think?

The other thing is you have to teach them how to pick up their heart and put it back in their body. Essential lesson! Of course 3D modeling is important, but you can’t 3D model your heart that’s laying on the table, that has just been smashed. You have to figure out how to put your heart back in your body and go, Okay. I’ll do this again tomorrow.

The hardest thing to learn is to not give a sh*t what anybody else thinks. That’s the hardest. Most people can’t do that. Paul McCartney doesn’t give a sh*t what you think about his songs, which is why he wrote 695 of them. He just keeps doing it. Eventually, you’re going to like one of them, or you’re not, and he doesn’t care. Most people who are successful really don’t give a sh*t what you think about them. They just do it, and they’re all freaks. Normal people love freaks. I tell my students about this. I say, Okay, now you’ve presented it and you’re heard whatever I said, and you have to not give a sh*t about what I said. You have to absorb it. You have to kind of go, maybe that’s right. Maybe they’re correct about how I’m thinking about this. Maybe I should try to do it this way. But you really can’t care. The best designers that I know really don’t care.

The essential lesson is: trust yourself and your intuition, because you’re probably right. That doesn’t make everybody else wrong, they could all be right, too. But you have to have that feeling. Another important thing is to learn how to listen to people. That’s part of the presentation thing, to begin to learn how to listen to people. Many people lie every day. People get up, and they lie about four times before they even brush their teeth. To the person they’re laying next to, whoever. We don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. 90% of the time, that’s why we lie. People don’t know what they need. Did anyone know they needed an iPhone that would replace 50 products or more? It’s some enormous number of products that we don’t need anymore. Did anybody know they needed it? No, of course not. But there was this crazy person, Steve Jobs, who kept saying, That’s too hard. He had this vision of a thing that you could carry around in your pocket. Now everybody in the world has one, it has changed the world.

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Be sure to check out Part I of this interview!

A Q&A with Iconic Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part I

A Q&A with Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part I

Bruce Hannah is a renowned American industrial designer celebrated for his innovative and practical approach to design. A graduate of Pratt Institute in 1963, Hannah’s career blossomed through his collaboration with Andrew Morrison, resulting in groundbreaking furniture designs for Knoll International in the 1970s. Establishing his own design office in 1976, Hannah continued to create award-winning products, including the acclaimed Hannah Desk System, recognized as a “Design of the Decade” by the Industrial Designers Society of America in 1990. He joined the Pratt faculty in 1993 and has received numerous accolades for his teaching and thought leadership. Hannah’s influential work includes co-curating the “Unlimited By Design” exhibition and authoring notable books on design, underscoring his profound impact on the field. In Part I, we spoke to him about who has influenced him, his design philosophy, and how he feels about Knoll reissuing the iconic 1974 Office Chair he designed with Andrew Morrison.

Q: Can you share some of your early influences and mentors who shaped your approach to design?

A: I’d never have gone to Pratt if I hadn’t had Miss Egan as a Spanish teacher. She also taught art, but I took Spanish with her for two years. When I went to school you had to have two years of a language but you could take three. She was also my advisor. I went to her and I said, Miss Egan, what should I be doing as a junior? And she said, Please don’t take Spanish again.

So I took art with her, and I had fun doing it of course, and I came around to art. I applied to one school because she said, You should go to Pratt. I didn’t even know what Pratt was, by the way, and I was lucky enough to get in.

There are many other people who influenced me. At Pratt: Rowena Reed Kostellow and Alexander [Kostellow]. I’m responsible for creating books about both of them. Gail, my first wife, wrote the book about Rowena. That book is based on a slideshow that she and I worked on in 1980…I want to say 1988. Tucker Viemeister and I just did a book of the collected writings of Alexander Kostellow, which is 176 pages of stuff, which is pretty interesting. I’d been wanting to do that for years. I’d never gotten around to it and then Tucker said, Why don’t we do it? We self-published it on Blurb but people aren’t very interested in it. They should be interested in it because he says wonderful things. And he’s considered one of the fathers—if not the father—of industrial design education in this country.

He was asked one time, What about the Bauhaus? He said that it was a very interesting education but that it wasn’t for us. We needed to develop our own approach. One of the successes of his industrial design departments is that he was very interested in getting people jobs, as I have been as a design teacher.

There is a long list of people that I owe. Fred Ratti, who gave me my first job as a salesman. It wasn’t my first job ever, that was as a designer at S.S. White dental manufacturing on Staten Island, which was the big factory in the town I lived in, in Prince Bay. We lived by the 7:30 whistle or the 4:30 whistle. I grew up in one of those towns where everybody worked for S.S. White. When I graduated from college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I went there and I talked my way into a job, and Fred Ratti was a supplier from Engineered Plastic Product. He made custom plastic product parts for a product I worked on there. When I came back from the Army he said, Do you want to come work with me? I was making pretty good money by that time, being a designer, and I said, What can you pay me? He said, $100 a week. I said, I started three years ago at $100 a week. I’m making considerably more than that. And he said, That’s all I can afford. I said, I’ll take the job.

He was an enormous influence in terms of allowing me to stumble around with clients I didn’t realize were very important. Bell Labs was one of them at the time. This was the 1960s. Bell Labs invented the way we lived today. It wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg.

I figured out that I was a designer because I was calling on design firms. They were handing me drawings to take back to the shop and figure out how to make, and I was figuring out how to make them. After a couple years I realized, Hey, I actually know how to design stuff. Those were wonderful designers—I’m not calling them out—but I was taking their drawings and making them workable.

Q: How would you describe your design philosophy, and how has it evolved over the years?

A: My design philosophy really started to form when I stumbled on Andy Morrison and Steve [Gianakos] on Staten Island. We had worked together at Pratt. Andy went off to Montreal to work on the 1967 World’s Fair and I was working, running around New York City and New Jersey, figuring out how to make stuff. I quit that job and I left, happily. But I said, I have to try to do this design thing. And I didn’t really want to work for anyone. I had worked for two people who were wonderful employers, but they didn’t really make me want to live my life. So I designed this fiberglass chair, and I found out there was a plastic place on Staten Island called Aegis Plastic. They still exist, by the way. It was in a basement room full of furniture. There isn’t enough gold leaf in the world to cover all the stuff in this basement. It was Roma Furniture. I walked in and I thought, Oh my God, I know these forms. Andy and Steve were there, and that’s how I rekindled that friendship with Andy and Steve.

Andy said to me, You want to design a chair for Knoll? I said, Sure. The philosophy was: design a chair for Knoll and retire. That was it. Along the way we discovered all these other things that we thought were important. The first product we did together for Knoll was the suspension seating. It’s a sofa system, and the major structural element of it is a sailboat mast. We decided that we could make a very light piece of furniture with two aluminum castings and a couple of structures made out of the sailboat mast. We figured out how to make a sofa that could hold a thousand pounds but weighed 88 pounds. We also had this theory that everything costs a dollar a pound or it costs two dollars a pound an hour, or whatever – everything costs some denominator. So the less of it you could use, the better off everybody was. If you use less material, then you transport less material, dig up less material. And if you make it recyclable, you’ve stopped that habit of making something and throwing it away.

Part of that thinking was formed by a guy named Witold Rybczynski, who still teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has written a bunch of books. He had a laboratory at McGill. And Andy knew him, and he would come occasionally to hang out in our studio. He’d designed a little house made out of all kinds of recycled things with this 1966 tertiary water. So you have black water, gray water, white water, or clear water. You have solar panels. The house is made out of recycled sulfur. There are mountains of sulfur in the world that no one knows what to do with. We started to be influenced by these people we had no business actually hanging out with because they were much smarter than we were. Witold wrote a wonderful book that I still to this day recommend called Home. It’s about this new thing that human beings want which is called Comfort. A new idea actually, most people in the world are not comfortable yet, but, most Americans and most Europeans and lots of Asians… their lives are comfortable. Lots of Africans are comfortable. So that idea started to figure into it. Our neighbor was Walter De Maria, who was on the second floor of our building at 27 Howard Street. Walter did The Lightning Field and The Broken Kilometer. He filled a gallery in Stuttgart full of dirt. One of the first conceptual artists. Very interesting. So he was hanging around. I mean, nobody was doing anything. We were doing stuff but no one was getting on planes and going anywhere. We were in what would eventually become SoHo. We were playing stickball in the middle of West Broadway.

There were all these influences that led us to start thinking about the refinement of an idea in poetic ways. Walter’s work was very much influenced by that. So Andy and I were thinking not only about using less material, but also how we would go about doing it. The philosophy became very much like poetic writing. Poetry is about essence and trying to be clear about what you’re saying while saying something in a grand way. We started to think of all the things we were designing as poems.

So we didn’t use staples because I don’t know how you control staples. Staples are sort of like a lot of people putting a lot of dots at the end of something. You’re not quite sure how many you should have or where they go, and there’s no way to control it. We started to eliminate things from our vocabulary of design, and that led us to thinking about how few parts It would take to do something.

We’d ask, If it takes four parts, can you do it with three? If you can do it with three, can you do it with two? If you can do it with two, can you do it with one? If you do with one, do you really need it? We would say these things to each other. Andy and I worked together for 10 years, night and day, 365 days a year. It was basically a marriage. The sad thing is that he died just months before Knoll announced that they were going to reintroduce the chair. The whole thing has been very emotional in that way.

Bruce Hannah with 1974 Knoll Office Chairs — *Photo courtesy of Bruce Hannah.*

Q: Yes, the Office Chair you designed for Knoll with Andrew Morrison in 1974 is being reissued. How do you feel about this iconic design coming back to life? What do you think keeps the design timeless?

A: Emotional, fantastic, unexpected, delighted, excited. The thing was, Andy and I really wanted to design an antique. We thought if you designed an antique, or something that would become an antique, people loved it. Or they liked it a lot. Think of Michael Thonet’s chairs, they’re going on 200 years old as a design, these wooden chairs, because he figured out how to bend wood so it didn’t crack. And then once he did it, he kept doing it. That’s what you do: you beat the idea to death. You just keep banging on it. The Thonet side chair, due to genius or serendipity, comes along just as cafe society is exploding. We needed those chairs. People were going to sit around outside and drink coffee or tea and read the newspaper. They were wealthy, and that hadn’t happened before, not at this scale. So you had a lot of people walking around Vienna saying, We’re going to go listen to music in the afternoon. We need little chairs. We would look at these objects and try to figure out, What is that about?

I think timelessness comes back to Essence. There’s something essential about it. There’s essence in the form, and I think that’s different from ‘essential’. We really thought about it. We tried to make an office chair with the least number of parts. There were some givens. You had four or five casters, and you had a tilt mechanism, and a lift mechanism. But what else do you need? You need a base and a frame of some kind. So the thought was, Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…pillows.

We said, Okay, so we’ll go with the pillow. When we made that first frame, we just bolted the pillows on because we didn’t have a better way to do it, we hadn’t thought it through yet. At first we thought we could figure out how to make seat cushions and back cushions that just popped into place. We struggled with that and finally we just bolted them on. Going back to the poetry of it, the tilt mechanism we were using at the time was called the Helms mechanism. It was a mechanism that Knoll had designed for all of its chairs. They said, You have to use this. We said, Okay. The way you adjusted the tilt was with a little Allen wrench. So I said, Why don’t we connect the cushions with the Allen wrench that already exists? Then you’ll get the chair and you have one tool to adjust it, disassemble it, and assemble it. That always interested us also, How few things can you put something together with?

Every designer that we talked to said, Hide the bolts. But one of the other philosophies that came from that chair was, Let’s just make it obvious. Let’s just use them as an element. So they became an element.

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Stay tuned for Part II of this interview!

Creativity as a Natural Pathway

This article, co-written by Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman and Elham Morshedzadeh, Ph.D., was published in the Summer 2024 Issue of Innovation Magazine.

As industrial designers, we often rely on the natural flow of creativity to fuel our work, drawing inspiration from our surroundings, cultural experiences, and intuitive processes. However, sticking exclusively to these familiar paths can sometimes limit our potential for truly groundbreaking innovation. In this discussion, five talented women industrial designers explore the concept of creativity as a natural pathway as well as the benefits of embracing less conventional approaches. By stepping out of our comfort zones and experimenting with new techniques, we can uncover disruptive solutions and push the boundaries of design, opening up a world of possibilities that may have otherwise remained hidden.

We began by defining natural versus unnatural paths to creativity. The discussion revealed diverse perspectives among the six of us. A natural path to creativity was generally seen as an organic process, drawing on intuition, personal experiences, and iterative design. Celeste Greenbaum, Human Centered Researcher and Industrial Designer at Philips, highlighted this by explaining that natural creativity stems from “things that you derive from your skill set from, or from iteration.” This type of creativity is intrinsic and emerges from the designer’s own abilities and observations, grounded in traditional and learned methods in the design process.

An unnatural or supernatural path to creativity, on the other hand, was thought to involve external influences or unconventional methods. For example, generating an algorithm or using AI was considered an unnatural pathway. An unnatural approach leverages technology and other external tools to stimulate creativity, pushing beyond the innate capabilities of a single human mind. Elham Morshedzadeh, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Houston and IDSA WID Committee member, expanded on this by noting that unnatural creativity “can have a broader interpretation” and includes learned techniques that may not come intuitively. By embracing these unexpected and often abstract and not fully explored methods, designers can uncover innovative solutions that might not arise from traditional processes alone. As Dr. Mary Beth Privitera, M.Des., PhD FIDSA Principal, Design & Human Factors at Sentiar and Professor, Biomedical Engineering University of Cincinnati, pointed out, the interplay between natural and supernatural pathways can lead to unique and diverse design outcomes, enriching the creative process through a dynamic exchange of ideas and methods.

The design process is fluid and knowing when to shift your thinking is critical. As the conversation shifted to pinpointing the moment when a designer realizes that it’s time to change up the way they are thinking, the group brought forth a rich tapestry of experiences and insights. Greenbaum reflected on challenges wherein traditional methods fell short, such as designing a product for children that initially seemed uncomfortable and unappealing. She shared, “I get really stuck when the design requirements lead to something that looks like a torture contraption.” Changing up the approach can lead to fresh ways to think about a design. This change often requires reaching outside conventional techniques and incorporating elements that transform the product into something playful and engaging.

Privitera underscored the designer’s responsibility to think differently, stating, “It’s almost like your responsibility to think differently.” When assessing any project, it’s essential to ask ‘is this something that’s desirable?’ The drive to infuse unique, appealing elements into designs is necessary , whether developing medical tools or everyday kitchen items. By embracing diverse approaches, designers can break free from conventional constraints and create products that resonate on both functional and emotional levels.

Katie Lim, Senior Industrial Designer, frog & Chair of IDSA Women in Design NYC Chapter, emphasized the importance of storytelling in guiding clients and users through innovative changes, noting that “if you can tell somebody a really good story you can hook them in from the beginning.” Storytelling helps mitigate resistance to change and makes new ideas more accessible. It can be a valuable tool when faced with resistance to thinking differently. Morshedzadeh expanded on the significance of storytelling, particularly in today’s technologically advanced landscape. She pointed out that “having these technologies helps us to create more realistic stories” and has revolutionized how designers communicate their visions. This blend of narrative and visual tools fosters a deeper emotional connection between a product and its users.

The conversation then shifted to examining how natural and unnatural methods might influence user experience. This part of the discussion highlighted the importance of empathy, attention to detail, and the inherent biases that designers must navigate. Lim emphasized the significance of stepping outside of personal design perspectives to truly understand user needs, sharing an example of designing an unboxing experience for cancer patients. She noted that “going through the actual motions to understand all those in-between moments of the key touch points” is imperative for creating a user-centered experience. Greenbaum concurred, adding that meticulously mapping out every detail of user interaction is essential, even if it feels “unnatural” due to the depth of analysis required.

A rigorous approach to understanding user experience ensures that designers can identify both the strengths and weaknesses of a design. On the other hand, Privitera highlighted the challenges of qualitative research, pointing out that it’s inherently biased by personal interpretations and selection criteria. She stressed that navigating these biases requires “taking that leap of faith and looking at it from another perspective” to achieve an optimal solution. She also described the complexity of designing for future technologies, such as augmented reality in medical applications, where traditional design tools and prototype testing fall short. Privitera aptly summarized this dynamic tension: “I’m designing a new future, but I’m not in that future. And so I’m predicting again what I think that future might be.” This underscores the iterative nature of design, where natural intuition and unnatural, innovative methods must work in tandem to enhance user experiences in the most effective way.

Balancing intuition and critical thinking in design, especially when using generative tools, was a topic that sparked diverse perspectives among the group. Yi-Ping Wong, Director of Operations for IN2 INNOVATION believes that the balance lies in using generative tools for improvements, validations, and inspirations. “If we can feed generative tools with information and parameters derived from intuition and critical thinking, they can help generate ideas that we might not have thought of ourselves. While these ideas may not be the final solution, they can push the boundaries of our approach” Greenbaum highlighted the importance of understanding both personal and stakeholder biases. She emphasized that designers must introduce innovations in ways that respect users’ autonomy and expertise.

Morshedzadeh echoed the need for designers to embrace scientific methods to enhance decision-making reliability, despite the resistance this approach might face within the design community. She argued that using established tested methods would help us avoid making biased decisions. This integration of scientific rigor can help designers navigate their preconceived notions and produce more robust outcomes.

Privitera discussed the fluid interplay between unstructured intuition and structured critical thinking. She illustrated this balance with a personal example: “In my own head, I am a superhero with the cape and I can come up with really creative ideas that are wacky and fun.” Yet, these ideas are then rigorously evaluated to ensure feasibility. This interplay is pivotal, as designers oscillate between unfettered creativity and practical constraints, depending on whether they are refining existing products or conceptualizing entirely novel ones. Starting with broad, imaginative concepts before refining them with practical constraints allows designers to avoid being constrained by existing paradigms. Lim noted, “If you start off with the constraints, you’re designing the same thing everyone else is designing.” This process of shifting from unstructured to structured thinking fosters innovation while ensuring practical yet creative viability.

When discussing how to stay up to date with emerging technologies and tools in the design field using both natural and unnatural approaches, the panel offered a range of strategies. Lim emphasized the value of looking beyond the traditional design sphere: “I like to look outside of the design.” This approach broadens the scope of inspiration and keeps designers informed about trends in various industries.

Privitera highlighted the importance of attending conferences to gain exposure to unexpected innovations: “Attending conferences, you see a whole host of different things that you wouldn’t even expect.” She noted that events like the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) conferences offer diverse insights that can inspire new design approaches. Industry conferences and tradeshows, such as CES (Consumer Electronics Show), and SXSW (South by Southwest), have always focused on the latest technologies, tools, and industry trends. These events provide an excellent opportunity to learn about a wide range of topics and perspectives in one setting. Wong added, “Networking with professionals who are passionate about these subjects is also valuable. Whether you agree or disagree on certain topics, it is important to maintain an open attitude towards discussion and new perspectives.”

Other participants also shared their methods for staying informed. Greenbaum mentioned the benefits of interdisciplinary learning that arose from her interest in cognitive psychology, which has now extended into nursing training to deepen her clinical knowledge. This point was emphasized by other panelists who shared examples of designers that sought additional training in fields like acupuncture and surgery. These experiences provide valuable perspectives that significantly enhance their design capabilities in their chosen field.

Morshedzadeh, sharing an academic perspective, emphasized the importance of continuous learning: “When I come across something that I believe I can teach or incorporate into one of our courses and it piques my interest, I’ll incorporate it into the curriculum, starting with elementary basics. This way, we can practice and explore its potential.” This approach not only keeps her skills sharp but also ensures that new graduates are well-equipped with the latest tools and technologies, boosting their confidence and employability.

In conclusion, the discussion among this group of industrial designers, all with a wide variety of experience and specialization,underscores the importance of embracing both natural and unnatural paths to creativity in the design process. While drawing from personal experiences and intuition forms the foundation of design, integrating unconventional methods and technologies can unlock new pathways of innovation. By challenging conventional thinking and experimenting with diverse approaches, designers can break free from limitations and uncover disruptive solutions that resonate deeply with users. Furthermore, maintaining a balance between intuitive creativity and critical analysis, as well as staying informed about emerging technologies through avenues like industry conferences and interdisciplinary learning, are essential for driving continuous growth and pushing the boundaries of design excellence. As we navigate the ever-evolving landscape of design, it is this dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation that fuels our journey towards creating impactful and meaningful experiences for users worldwide.

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