Hollis is a kinetic side table. The table surface moves freely within a 130 cm (51 Inch) diameter on two pivoting arms that join it to the stem. The height of the table surface is positioned to easily slide over a seated persons lap and stow conveniently underneath a desk or table. The kinetic tabletop follows the motions of a user as they interact with the space around them – turning around to show a colleague something on a lap top screen or shifting to one side to face a new direction. The steel base is covered with a mat of Nike Grind, a scratch resistant rubber-flooring made from recycled sneakers. This textured surface invites the user to move in on the table and place their feet on the base while they work on the table surface. The stem and pivoting mechanism are constructed with steel, Nylon gliders and hardware. The table surface is made with laminated aluminum over a lightweight wooden core, and the edge of the table is finished with a rubber bumper that protects it and the items around it as it moves. Envisioned as a flexible tool for contemporary needs, Hollis could be placed at a bedside, next to a desk, adjacent a kitchen table, or anywhere where an extra surface may be needed.

© Daniele Ansidei & JODR

Factor is an ergonomic library shelf made of ebonized teak. Employing a natural arc, the shelf is designed around the sight and reach of a user and emphasizes the act of searching and reaching for books. Brims on the front and back ends of each shelf keep tilted books from falling out. Factor is intended for libraries, bookshops, homes, offices and anywhere in which a large collection of books might be stored. After being exhausted in other product sectors such as seating, computing and transportation, ergonomic design has inevitably lost integrity and meaning. Nevertheless, its original principles remain beautiful and allow us to build furniture around and for the human body. This approach has seldom been explored in shelving. Placed in facing rows Factor resembles a fuselage or tunnel as seen from the interior – it envelopes the body in books and provides an engaging experience for typically square libraries.

• New York City
• 2010

• La Maddalena
• 2009

• Paris
• 2008

• Milano, Italy
• 2008

As technology surges ahead, our ability to adapt it to our lives and living spaces often lags behind. For us, enamored with our new gadget, what it is often takes precedent over where it goes. A good example of this incongruity is the proliferation of personal computers in contemporary kitchens.

In many homes, the kitchen has become the social hub, and since computers support every facet of our daily lives, the overlap is inevitable. So what can a kitchen computer do? For starters: Online cookbooks replace their printed ancestors; video conferencing with family and friends reinforces and enhances the social nature of the space; music software eliminates the need for audio players; and web browsers provide access to information and entertainment, making TVs superfluous. The kitchen and the computer are an ideal match, but their pairing remains as awkward as sushi and milk.

Attempts at integrating the computer into the kitchen have yet to produce sophisticated results. In 1969, Honeywell offered a kitchen computer with a binary interface for $10,000 from Neiman Marcus. It’s unclear if any were ever sold. More recently, specialized kitchen computers built onto refrigerator doors may allow you to keep track of your grocery list, but they have little regard for spatial planning. Their only reason for appearing on appliances is because appliance companies developed them. The niche market for a kitchen-specific computer may never justify the research and development that a desktop computer does, so the latter will remain a better choice. The immediate problem is that kitchens are poorly designed to accommodate our regular computers.

A search through online images for “kitchen computer” turns up hundreds of photographs illustrating the challenges encountered when computers are ham-handedly introduced to this new environment. Desktops and towers take over kitchen islands, inelegantly divide space, and turn what is normally an active surface into a computer lab. Wall-mounted monitors 
appear in spaces where televisions are normally installed, while the keyboards and mice that operate them are placed on the nearest countertops by default. Kitchen office nooks, originally designed around land-line telephones and paper calendars, are now repurposed for computers and printers. Laptops are designed to do well in makeshift situations, but in kitchens they are particularly vulnerable to 
hazards. What each of these scenarios shares is an integration problem.

The issue persists even for those who wish to remodel their kitchen to support computer use. In interviews with four interior designers, each said their clients always request a dedicated computer space in the kitchen. It’s surprising then that kitchen manufacturers don’t offer any integrated solutions (although laptops do get plopped into their neatly styled photo shoots every now and then).  Nevertheless, counter and table surfaces are the basic locations for considering computer placement within today’s kitchen.

For a computer that is an integral part of the cooking process, a counter-height station, gracefully placed within the kitchen, is ideal. Steps away from an omelet that needs flipping or a pot requiring a stir, a countertop computer allows its user to stay engaged in food preparation and socializing while remaining plugged in. The kitchen designer’s hallowed “work triangle” refers to an ideal triangular configuration for storage, preparation, and cooking areas. To be useful during cooking, the computer should be located within this triangle. Unfortunately, kitchen companies have given this little thought. Even worse, when asked about accommodating computers on counters, sales representatives expressed enthusiasm for installations that place computers “safely” behind roll-top appliance garages. But appliance garages were designed for storing cereal boxes and blenders, not for computers that demand interaction.

Die-hard laptop users face another set of problems and possible solutions. As the laptop is brought in dangerous proximity of cooking it should be elevated above the range of most spills. Like cookbook holders that make reading easier, a small portable laptop pedestal would raise our electronic companions out of harm’s way, and a silicone cover will protect the keyboard from sticky fingers. Areas of kitchen islands and counters where cooking preparation doesn’t take place could also be raised, creating distinct levels for computing. Convenient stow-away space and well-placed electric outlets would complete the laptop integration.

Reviewing the floor plans of standard kitchen models, it seems quite feasible to redraw the kitchen work triangle as a quadrilateral. Solutions 
to our problem become clearer as we consider where our computer 
will sit in relation to the stove, sink, and refrigerator. Neighboring the sink is out of the question until computers are waterproof. Next to a stove, conditions improve slightly. Like the refrigerator, the computer’s backside should be against a wall, so it doesn’t create a wall of its own in the middle of the kitchen. These constraints leave our digital device away from the sink, on a counter, along a wall, and most likely fighting for space that currently belongs to cabinets and preparation surfaces. A monitor can be mounted on an adjustable arm that allows it to be flexibly oriented. The dilemma between preparation surfaces and keyboards and mice is irrelevant for those who favor touch screens. A wireless keyboard and mouse can be temporarily stored in a drawer, but this offers little solace to those who don’t unplug. It’s also likely that in the absence of cookbooks, radios, land-line telephones, and old office nooks, there is some surplus surface to be found.

The irony of many high-end kitchen designs is that many of the people who buy them don’t even cook. And we can be sure that there are people who don’t use computers either. Yet for those who do both, hope could be on the way. This past fall a dedicated kitchen computer named QOOQ was introduced in France. With a ten-inch waterproof screen, wifi connectivity, recipe subscription service (with video), and meal planning calendar, it’s an intriguing step into uncharted territory. The drawbacks are that it’s only available in French, and its dedicated software doesn’t allow us to do many of the things we have come to expect of our machines. It seems for now the ultimate solution has yet to come.

 
Photo © Getty Images

Last June I attended a plastics trade fair in Chicago. Walking through a stadium-sized hall filled with the wares of mould manufacturers, I became lost in a maze of production tools and as a result it took me two hours to find the plastics companies I had come there to see. In a second hall I found hundreds of booths selling a host of bizarre metal gadgets and tubes, which I learned are the components that make the moulds themselves. Many of today’s products are created with the help of hundreds of other inter-dependent manufacturing products. I left the fair with the dizzying realisation that the metal-gadget industry is built around the mould industry, which is built around the plastics industry, which is built around other industries like the automotive or furniture industry, which are built around real people’s needs.

Products furnish our existence. They are all around us and appear in an incomprehensibly large variety. A world population of 6.7 billion, which data suggests will increase by almost forty percent by 2050, assures that the gamut of human needs is wider today than it has ever been and is growing fast. Assuming that even the poorest of the world’s citizens use a dozen products to execute their daily tasks, and factoring this into the global population, there’s a staggering minimum of 80 billion products operating in today’s society.

Webster’s dictionary defines a product as: “Anything produced or obtained as a result of some operation or work, as by generation, growth, labor, study, or skill.” Our society expands the definition by requiring that a product sell at some profit. Outside of these loose parameters, a clear expression of what products mean in the world today is surprisingly difficult to find. Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, offers no entry on the subject.

In the everyday, products seem simple: we buy them, they serve a purpose, and if they cease to be useful, we discard them. A deeper look at the situation takes us down a rabbit hole where billions of inter-dependent products, hyper-specialised factories, massive shipping movements, a splintered design profession and fanatical consumers obscure any unified sense of what products are, and lead us to numerous contradictions and questions.

The truth is, most of us live a life surrounded by products without the slightest clue as to where or how they’re made – and for good reasons. For instance, while shopping at a clothing store, little evidence suggests that entire industries are at work to make even the simplest items. Nothing there will tell you that your shoes were the work of professional manufacturers, designers, engineers, product-developers, sales teams, marketing teams, accountants, lawyers, factory workers, shipping and receiving staff. And why should it? Most retail shops are in the business of selling products, not educating the consumer.

As we look around, it’s easy to see that everything in our built environment is also constructed with products. Works of architecture are massive agglomerates of commodities churned out by the building industry: glass panels, beam fittings, ceiling tiles, carpeting, overhead lighting, HVAC systems, electrical conduits – the list goes on and on. What we don’t see from the average building facade is that behind the scenes these products are rigorously assessed to meet the highest safety standards. It’s not uncommon for facades to be built and tested at explosives facilities before they’re realised in cities. Why? Car bombs. What does this mean? It means that windows are designed as much against explosives as they are for people, and of course, behind this act of bomb-proofing are more specialised products.

Transporting these things from their factories to their destinations is a shipping operation of massive scale and the largest of its kind in human history. Visualising this phenomenon takes only an application of basic geometry to the dry financial figures we read in newspapers. Consider the fact that every year China exports $1.3 billion worth of car tyres to the US, which sell at an average price of $40. Unit cost over total sales tells us that in this particular business deal there are 32.5 million tyres shipped across the Pacific Ocean. Given that the average car tyre takes up .07 cubic metres, we know that these yearly shipments carry 2.2 million cubic metres of tyre – which is more than double the volume of the Empire State Building. At this rate it would only take a decade to outfit midtown Manhattan with a rubber skyline. How do we accomplish such incredible shipments? It’s done with the aid of thousands of other products like turbofans, shipping-container cranes and navigation software.

Shipping containers in particular have had a profound impact on how products are designed. The more compactly products fit inside a container, the cheaper the shipping cost per unit becomes. In home furnishings, Ikea is the master of this technique. A colleague of mine designed a bed system for the Swedish brand some years ago and the project was cancelled when it became apparent that the design was poorly shaped to meet the minimum quantity per container. Under these constraints, home furnishings have as much to do with the companies that transport them as they do with the places to which they are shipped.

The tendency with all these things is that products are increasingly designed around other products – metal gadgets for moulds, windows for bombs and furniture for shipping containers – and decreasingly designed around people. Another example of this is how competition in developed industries creates a flood of similar but different products. In this case the principle objective of the design is to stand out among others like it. As a result, every type of product generally comes in endless variations. This is conspicuously apparent in the bottled-water section of any market, and here too, the bottles seem to speak more to each other than they do to us.

As consumers we have been conditioned to expect and accept products that look and function differently from precedent models. Change is a pillar of industry, and the technology and design professions are based on the belief that positive progress can be created through invention and improvement upon what already exists. An example of this is how typewriters were outdone by word processors, which in turn were superseded by computers. The basic function in each case – writing – is unchanged, but the level of performance is increased drastically with each successive model. For millennia, writing was achieved with pen and ink, but in the last century we have changed our facilities for this activity several times. Such shifts impact our behaviour and our society profoundly. A small effect would be that children spend their time learning keyboards instead of cursive script; a large one would be that global communication is transformed forever.

Considering the immense power that products have on the social and political functions of our society, it’s surprising that they go largely unchecked by government and institutions. Deregulated manufacturers can pretty much make and sell anything, as long as it doesn’t result in injury, death or a lawsuit. Ultimately the only real check and balance on products is the market, which leaves all the responsibility over much of our surrounding environment to manufacturers and designers.

When a politician does something even slightly scandalous, journalists are up in arms for weeks, but before a peep is heard from the press about a faulty product it has to go as far as severely injuring people – the toxic Mattel toys come to mind. The lack of criticism is understandable given that horrible designs are far less interesting and far more abundant than corrupt politicians. The few design critics there are, justifiably spend their time writing about the products that inspire them over the ones that don’t. However, a broad and deep reflection on products is lost amidst a total division between the politics, science, technology and style sections of our newspapers. Under the jurisdiction of the style section, which largely functions as a trend-spotting shopping guide, the meaning of design is mostly conveyed through tasteful home furnishings, accessories, graphics and fashion, and rarely through hard facts and larger social phenomena. The result is a misguided public that associates design exclusively with rarified products, and lacks the vocabulary to assess designs that carry heavier political impact, such as solar panels, subway cars and medical equipment.

Humans have successfully catalogued most known plants and animals, yet any hope of doing the same for products was buried in landfills a long time ago. This hampers serious study on the subject, because we have few outstanding historical resources on which to base such an endeavour. The closest things we have to taxonomies of everyday products are vintage Sears Roebuck catalogues, and those went extinct years ago. Technical manuals for engine components are easy enough to come by, but I doubt Library of Congress holds on to these things. In short, we have a better understanding of the natural world than we do of the one we have constructed, though whether we like it or not, the latter makes up our predominant reality.

If we turn to design museums for in-depth knowledge, we find that their collections focus only on the most inspired products, which collectively offer us a distorted bigger picture. The products that most profoundly affect society are not necessarily well designed. With few exceptions, design museums are little more informative than good retail shops. Both tend to be filled with perfectly nice products but lack the depth of information that would give the public a greater sense of what objects mean in today’s culture. Outside the institution, the general lack of information is only obscured further by the marketing profession, whose job it is to distract us from anything but satisfaction. You would have better luck getting free products from a company than unbiased information from its public-relations team.

The values that our society places on products become clear when we look at the designers who garner the most attention. Lots of people know who Karl Lagerfeld is, fewer know what Philippe Starck does, fewer still know that Chris Bangle designs automobiles, and almost no-one could name the best wind turbine-designer. While we tend to like, understand and appreciate simple products, we are not easily enamoured with technical or infrastructural things. This has as much to do with how products are marketed and covered in the media as it does with the public’s ignorance regarding engineering and technology. And the two only perpetuate each other. No one gets excited about buying a new car battery, but a new lounge chair is a different story. As a result, there are countless coffee-table books on chair design and few good resources on the infrastructural products that distinguish our time from the twenty-first century BC.

One would think that the industrial-design field might at least have developed some internal solidarity on how to go about making a product, but there’s as little consensus there as anywhere else. The profession is barely a hundred years old, but since its beginning, ideological differences and have caused division, argument, fragmentation, and specialisation.

In the early twentieth century, while a craft-based decorative approach caved under rational functionalism in Europe, a modern decorative movement gave way to streamlined styling in the US. Exiled by Nazis, the proponents of functionalism immigrated to the States, where some Americans were developing a functional organic design. To cater to the specialised needs of the post-war automotive industry, automotive design schools formed independently of industrial design schools, creating an academic and vocational division that still exists today. The field was further segregated as some corporations created in-house design teams and ceased to rely on independent design offices. While streamlined styling diluted into lesser forms of styling, functionalism flourished, turned into clean-cut modernism and eventually won people’s favour. Then boredom set in, which was followed by disbelief in commercialism, anti-design, ergonomics and a growing distrust between the in-house and independent designers. With postmodernism came more arguments. Out of frustration, some designers succeeded into a new profession where they could be taken seriously, at least briefly: product design. Since then, the field has disbanded into nothing less than anarchy.

In an essay expressing frustration with this phenomenon, the American designers Bruce and Stephanie Tharp list the plethora of specialised methods from which today’s designers can choose:

user-centered design, eco-design, design for the other 90%, universal design, sustainable design, interrogative design, task-centered design, reflective design, design for well-being, critical design, speculative design, speculative re-design, emotional design, socially-responsible design, green design, conceptual design, concept design, slow design, dissident design, inclusive design, radical design, design for need, environmental design, contextual design, and transformative design. ’

They missed a few, but the list is still telling. The absence of a philosophical unity in the way we go about making things is a symptom of our technologically driven, globalised culture. From the Bronze Age until very recently, individual cultures had their own specific ways of making objects, but today there are as many ways to make products as there are designers and manufacturers.

Currently, artists are the only group with the clairvoyance to shed light on some of the larger phenomena surrounding products. More than any other sources, Andreas Gursky’s photos of factory workers, Damian Ortega’s exploded car, and Edward Burtynsky’s ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ give us a vivid understanding of who makes products, how they are built, and what effect they are having on the environment. Why this should be has as much to do with our distance from these happenings as it does with the artist’s ability to convey them. In simpler times, people knew the craftsman who made their goods, understood the basic tools used to make them, and lived in odorous proximity to where they were dumped after use.

The segmentation of today’s consumer, retailer, manufacturer and waste system leaves each with little knowledge of or impact on how the other functions. Uninformed sales staffs have never seen a factory floor, and therefore can’t possibly explain its workings to the customer. What few factories are open to the public are not exactly destinations for tourists and school groups. Consequentially, the public has no way of distinguishing what has been made on an eighteen-hour shift, in a poorly ventilated factory – by underpaid, underage workers – from what has been made in positive working conditions.

Market studies, focus groups and intuition combined can’t predict how the public will respond to a product once it’s released. Don Chadwick, the American designer, once explained to me that that when he, Bill Stumpf and Herman Miller took a leap of faith with the Aeron Chair, none of them had a clue that the design would result in what is now the ubiquitous office chair. And how could they have known how millions of people would react to their product before they started selling it? 

The geographical gap that separates consumers, manufactures and the waste we all create is perhaps the bleakest of all. A few examples are enough to depict the grim reality. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an island in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas and made up of discarded plastic products carried and trapped by ocean currents. Western countries dump mountains of old products on poor countries willing to sell landfill space. Cities of E-waste have popped up in Africa and Asia, where local inhabitants sift through toxic heaps of old keyboards, computers and monitors, salvaging parts for profit while poisoning their communities.

Nevertheless, our faith in products is unwavering. Like sports teams, religion and TV, products gather large groups of devoted followers. Days before a new iPhone is released, eager customers equipped with tents and camping chairs begin queuing up outside Mac stores. In 2008, the opening of the Harajuku H&M shop drew approximately 2,500 fashionistas, who waited in line for hours in the cold November rain to be the first ones in. Amidst a vast abundance of products, our obsession with them leads us to behave as though they were in short supply.

Some recent tendencies in technology and design are pointing towards a conceivable decline in tangible products. Software, digital information and communication are all achieved with little in the realm of physical material. The letter-openers, paper trays, calculators, calendars, Rolodexes, and land-line telephones that characterised my mother’s desk are not on mine – they’re in my pocket. Single digital products are eliminating series of disparate objects.

Another interesting shift away from physical products is in the focus given by some in the design industry to designing services and activities geared towards improving customer-service strategies and corporate work patterns. The fact that both the clients and the design consultancies are speaking of design in terms of service and not product implies a world with fewer products and more activities. This would do wonders for the obese children who never get outside. Yet until products become invisible, we’re still left with billions of them to figure out what to do with.

The more products our culture turns out, the more contradictions appear around them. We can equate the widening gamut of products with an increase in their specificity to each other, and a decrease in their relationship to us. Boosted unit sales mean boosted unfamiliarity between the manufacturers and their customers. The more industry and manufacturing grow, the farther they get from our doorsteps and the less we understand their processes.

The same can be said for garbage. It’s ironic that we are trashing the natural world, which we cherish, admire and study, for products that we don’t care enough about to document. Surrounded by an abundance of products, we take desperate measures to acquire them. Our willingness to accept novel tools and rapidly change our behaviour around them makes us the most adaptable civilisation yet. Still, our astounding ignorance of how these tools are made, distributed and disposed of make us the most ignorant. While we have little control over the rate at which products are made, we do have the ability to control our knowledge and thus our interaction with them.

Even amidst the growing complexity that surrounds them, products maintain their power to imbue our lives with a sense of fulfillment. The best products are tools that enhance our lives, allow us to do things that would otherwise be impossible and give us great pleasure. Think of the difficult work of street cleaners and the essential brooms that help them do it, or the excitement to be had with a wonderful fishing lure. Imagine the incredible satisfaction of eliminating electricity bills and pollution by installing a state-of-the-art wind turbine on your roof. Made with positive intentions, products like these aren’t designed to dupe you, grab your attention over other items on the shelves, or end up floating in the ocean. The overwhelming challenges that stand between human needs and the products that answer them can only be solved optimistically if they are understood. With such knowledge and optimism, our chances for a healthy manufactured and natural world increase exponentially.

Photo © BMW AG

‘ ”Discursive Design.” Bruce and Stephanie Tharp. 2008 National  Education Conference Proceedings.  Industrial Design Society of America: Virginia. Pp. 237-245.

Ciclo is a three-sided revolving shelf made of ebonized teak. In nineteenth century libraries revolving bookcases provided compact storage, and Ciclo reintroduces the archetype for today’s homes, offices and shops. A new structural approach, which merges three ample cases and aligns each with the center of the whole unit, optimizes access and rotation for the user. The core of the design is left open for additional storage space, transparency and the passage of light.

Abitare puts to trial new icons of furniture and product design. In a virtual court, a prosecutor and a defense attorney (played by two renowned design critics) analyze and discuss the merits and defects of the design piece and interrogate the designer and the producer, who are called to the witness stand, in order to give detailed insight to contemporary design leaving the final verdict to the audience.

In the case of the 360° office chair by Magis, please step forward, Jonathan Olivares, for the prosecution, Paola Antonelli, the defense attorney, and the two witnesses, designer Konstantin Grcic and producer Eugenio Perazza. The court is in session.

Edited by Anniina Koivu

As first witness, Mr. Konstantin Grcic, could you give us a brief presentation of the chair which is on trial.

Witness 1: The chair is called 360°, because it turns around 360 degrees and you can sit on it in all directions. It’s a chair but somehow it isn’t. It is something to sit on and to work on in many different places, not only in the office, but also in the kitchen, in a shop or at the hairdressers. Even if we consider work as an activity, this does not necessarily mean that you have to sit still for a long time, the important thing is to be able to sit dynamically. The chair comes in two versions: with wheels and as a stool, which are both height-adjustable. Thank you.

Thank you Mr Grcic. The prosecution, would you like to state your case?

Accusation: My case against the 360° chair comes from the way it sees life in the office. I am not criticizing its role in a private home nor its role in a barber shop or in the kitchen, but I am critical of its role as a product intended for the office market. And here I accuse the chair of being a formally driven product for a small, design-sensitive market. It is not a product for a market linked to office culture of a mass kind. I would like to move to my first evidence, the “Capisco” chair by Peter Opsvik from 1984. This is the archetype of an office chair that offers as many postures as the 360°, or even more. This chair was developed according to ergonomic philosophies around that time and it is a real product. Down the street of my office in Boston there is the MIT building and its four floors are filled with these chairs. So the Opsvik chair is a product which is meant for heavy contract use and it has been on the market now for more than 20 years. With my second piece of evidence, the George Nelson’s “Perch” from 1964, I would like to point to the use of materials here. Its seat was produced in a hopsack material, which is very soft and allows you to slide back and forth on it without catching your clothing. Whereas the 360° is sticky. It is precisely because of its material that the 360° will fail in the office contract world. The moulded polyurethane foam on a steel frame is impossible to recycle. You cannot take it apart.

Mrs Antonelli, your defence.

Defense: Thank you Your Honour and members of the jury. Do we need another office chair? The answer is no, UNLESS it can provide something new in our lives, unless it is different enough to force us to change our habits, to sit better, to work better and to try to live better. As a person with back problems, I have been taught that the number one rule in trying to preserve your back in the office is to not stay seated for more than 20 minutes. It is to change your position as often as you can. You have to be uncomfortable in order to be comfortable. The 360° chair is definitely linked to this issue. It is disruptive. It is irritating. It isn’t pretty. The 360° is a good innovation that still needs to be tested, incorporated and put on trial in real life. You know, in reality, Peter Opsvik’s chair, which is fantastic, does not get used in all those varied positions. Why? Because it looks too much like a normal chair. An object like the 360° forces us to try and to find the right position, to try to use it in a different way. Also, what the accused calls formalism is in my opinion a way to get under our skin and to really make us think differently about chairs. Do we really need a 360°? We don’t know yet, but we will in a couple of years.

The court calls the two witnesses, designer Konstantin Grcic and producer Eugenio Perazza, to the stand. What are the questions from the prosecution?

Accusation: Let’s cut to the chase: if in fact it is a chair, how long can you possibly sit on this? And do you see it in an office context or elsewhere?

Witness 1: I think we will need a presentation of the chair in practice in order to defend the product: I use the 360° in my office. I fidget on chairs anyway, so it feels natural to me to jump on it, swivel and turn around, to pull it up to a table when discussing something with my assistants. And this might only take 30 seconds. And this is already a form of sitting. We often only sit on the front edge of chairs. Most of the time, we are not relaxed, our body is tense and we need to sit on something that gives hard support rather than to sink into soft cushions. I want to get up easily. Therefore the chair has been minimized into something like a log. The backrest is important psychologically rather than in terms of comfort. It is something you see as a boundary.

Accusation: But all of these qualities were already present in 1964. So if I understand correctly, there is no functional deliverable novelty…

Defense: Objection, Your Honour! Anybody who has been sitting on the George Nelson “Perch” chair throughout university and has got a tail bone irritation knows that this is not a chair you can live your life on. Therefore it cannot be compared to the 360° chair.

Accusation: My second argument is linked to the production of the object: how large is production going to be and what is Magis’ buy back program? What happens to the polyurethane, when it ages and starts cracking in 10 years time?

Witness 2: About five to six months into the development of the 360° chair, I wrote a letter to Konstantin about how his status as a design icon has given him remarkable international success, but how a product such as the extraordinary “Chair_One”, which he designed in 2003, can also lead to a personal disaster. Whatever he is going to develop for Magis, it will always be compared to “Chair_One” and will have to achieve the same quality standards. This is the reason why we refused several designs until Konstantin came up with the 360°. I jumped for joy when I saw it. And, dear Olivares, this is not only because of its response to ergonomical standards, which are used to measure the chairs in the world. This is not the only way we think. Believe me, I’d be the first to condemn a chair that does not work. As for the question on recycling, I can announce that on March 23, at 4 pm, the world’s first liquid wood was developed in our laboratories. This is the result of years of research. Magis is a company which is very sensitive to eco-sustainable questions. It might well be that in the future this product will be converted. Why can’t we have liquid leather, something we are looking into today?

Accusation: Ergonomically I have not criticized the chair. Actually, if you read Galen Cranz’s book “The Chair”*, this is an ergonomically correct chair for temporary seating. The question is: although it may be made in liquid leather some day, right now it is in moulded polyurethane over a steel frame. How many pieces will be made and what is the plan for recycling this existing version?

Witness 2: When Konstantin designed the extraordinary “Chair_One” in 2003, it passed rather unobserved at its first launch at the Salone del Mobile. Nobody really noticed it. The more innovative a product, the slower its launch and acceptance on the market, and the slower people’s comprehension. But now, the second day of the fair, we have already seen great interest in the 360° chair, whose production of 20.000 pieces a year will start in June 2009.

Defense: I would like to raise a counter-question. Dear colleague, you first talked about the Peter Opsvik chair. What is it made of?

Accusation: It is made of the same material as the 360°. But today there are examples of contemporary office chairs like the “Think” chair by Steelcase, which set higher ecological standards, which can be disassembled in 10 minutes by a trained team.

Defense: But as you brought us the Opsvik chair as an equal example, we stick to that one. Does the company have a recycling policy? Can you send it back?

Accusation: Most major office chair companies…

Defense: No, no, that particular chair.

Accusation: I would imagine that HAG does have a buy back program.

Defence: Are you sure?

Accusation: I imagine so, but I can tell you that the Herman Miller…

Defense: …Ahahah, that is ok, you think so. Please stick to the question. So what is the normal life cycle of an Opsvik chair?

Accusation: I would say, in an office, five to seven years.

Defense: But we have to make some distinctions here: in typical Italian fashion, the 360° starts out in small-scale production, as a prototype and a sample, and once it acquires acceptance in the market, other innovations take place along the way, and it can become much more sustainable. So it is an open-ended program in these terms.

Accusation: But if I understand correctly, today we are discussing this chair. Not its future embodiment.

Defense: No, whenever we discuss a chair we discuss an idea, we discuss a program. It is all open. One thing is only the beginning of its life. Its life can be in so many different materials.

Accusation: But the end of this chair’s inseparable materials will take up square footage in the land fill.

Defense: Just like the Opsvik chair…

Accusation: …which is 25 years old.

If there are no more questions, let’s move to the final statements. Mr. Olivares.

Accusation: In the discussion we have established a few things. Ergonomically the chair is correct. However it introduces nothing new. Ecologically, this particular model is a disaster, even though its annual production is very limited and the amount of damage that this chair is going to do is relatively small. But the chair is a formally driven product meant for an educated and very small, design-conscious population. As a proper office chair it would never have any great impact on daily life. When, a few weeks ago, I went to my dentist, and the receptionist sat on an “Aeron” chair, I stopped and asked: “So, how do you like that chair?” And she said: “What chair?”, she turned around, took her jacket off and said with some surprise: “Oh you mean, this chair? Well, it is a chair.” Even though I got excited that it was actually a Bill Stumpf chair, which is in the Museum on Modern Art, she a) did not care, b) did not know who had designed it and c) basically did not know what she was sitting on, even though she uses it five days a week. So I argue that the 360° chair should be destined for another kind of location. Will it live on in this context or will it only be cited by interior designers for its aesthetic qualities?

Defense: My esteemed colleague from the prosecution has presented me with some key arguments. The “Aeron” chair was actually introduced to the MoMA by yours truly in 1994, and I had to fight with the committees, especially Philip Johnson, who felt that the chair was ugly and uncomfortable. Ugliness or beauty, who cares! It is about finding a new way to sit better. It is a never-ending process. You said that there is nothing new with this chair. And I strongly disagreed with this argument. I believe that this chair has the same power as Castiglioni’s “Sella” chair, the one he created with the bicycle seat and half a sphere of steel, because he did not want to either sit nor walk when he was on the phone. It represents an alternative to the large balls that are used in the office in order to keep the abs in contraction and to have a better posture. I believe it creates a disruptive innovation in the office that demands to a rethink about the ways in which we work and sit. In the end, though, you argued that this chair is an ecological disaster, and this is true at this point, remains the fact that only 20.000 chairs a year will be made, as well as the fact that Magis is trying to discover newer and better materials that can actually be part of the cover and structure and that can be recycled and bio degradable. In this case the impact has been measured, the risk is high for the manufacturer, and experimentation is very important, all of which make this chair one of the best additions to the world of design that we have seen in recent years.

Witness: Design does not have to be politically correct. I don’t believe in the idea of democratic design, of something for everybody. Instead I believe strongly in an avant-garde, in ideas that have to be strong, spread down and moved forward before they trickle down and become accepted on a larger scale by other companies and by other designers. We might not contribute to the world of design on a large scale, that is really transforming office furniture, but with a single small product like this, I’d argue for the strength of the idea first. I totally agree with a lot of the criticism which has been directed against it, but I also believe that this chair will trigger other things that will probably improve office life.

Witness: For me it is a positive product. But I would like to make a new proposal to our lawyer about an idea which I have had in mind for many years: a Museum of Horrors, of all the mistaken products in the world. Having made a stroll through the fairground, this idea has once again become stronger in my head. Maybe even some pieces of Magis deserve to be part of the collection of this particular museum, but the 360° chair is definitely not among them.

We come to the final verdict. Members of the honourable jury in the audience, have you come to a verdict in the case of the 360° office chair?

Jury: We find the defendant Not Guilty.