The average person spends about eight years of their working life in an office chair. However, of the thousands of chairs listed in TASCHEN’s exhaustive research on chair design, only 25 could be classified as office seating. The category that holds us up for most of our adult lives is, according to its own industry, barely there.
This was the gap that the Swedish manufacturer Own designated to address with “The office chair has been renewed” exhibition organized at Framing inside Copenhagen’s Odd Fellow Palace during the city 3daysofdesign festival. Nine architects, designers and creatives were each invited to take a Savo chair and reinterpret it through their own discipline.
The office chair redesigned by Savo © Morten Nordstrøm
The office chair was redesigned by Savo © Rickard Grönkvist
The office chair redesigned by Savo © Morten Nordstrøm
The white paper of the show © Morten Nordstrøm
The office chair redesigned by Savo © Morten Nordstrøm
The office chair was redesigned by Savo © Rickard Grönkvist
The office chair redesigned by Savo © Morten Nordstrøm
The office chair redesigned by Savo © Morten Nordstrøm
own – The office chair was renewed:
The white paper
The report was just the visible edge of a larger research project. Savo commissioned a white paper called “Resetting Office Seating: From Backseat to Front Row”, who spent months trying to analyze the office chair phenomenon. The White Paper’s research team analyzed more than 400 exhibitor entries at major design weeks over the past ten years and found that office spaces account for just 8.1% of exhibitor attention, and their share is steadily declining.
The category is not just under-recognized by the public, but is losing ground among furniture designers themselves, even as remote and hybrid working has made the question of how and where we sit more debated than ever. It is a chair treated in a drastically different way compared to its peers: we always talk in terms of function, never conceptually or culturally, and it is often photographed as a technical object in a studio space, rather than in a local living environment, as is now the style of other categories of furniture.
The office chair as a design object
The paper’s argument is not just that office jobs have been overlooked, but that now is the best time to change that. Hybrid work has eroded the line between home and office, opening up a new class of private customers that didn’t exist in the space before. With this, the expectation that the workplace should be austere and the home should appear personal has eroded, and workers now have the same demands for comfort and expression in both. Interiors in general have become a more visible means of identity and self-expression, through social media trends and a new affordability found in “fast furniture,” fast fashion’s newer cousin.
This was the basis of the brief given to the nine creatives. The directive was not based on the usual ergonomics and manufacturability, but on making the office chair legible as a design object, something with the same cultural, conceptual and stylistic appeal as its siblings. CAN Architects worked in spatial terms, Ana Kras brought a material sensibility to the project, and Shawn Adams approached it through an architectural lens, opening up many ideas of what an office chair could look like.
The stakes beyond exposure
It’s easy to read this as an industry questioning its own constructed categories, as something that only concerns those who work in that field. However, the matter is more real than it may seem. Almost 1 in 3 employees report dissatisfaction with their office chaira figure that can easily be associated with poorer moods and therefore poorer productivity. At the other end of the product life, office chairs are largely discarded compared to other typologies, a number that could be linked to a simple lack of emotional attachment to the category: if people don’t feel connected to an item they are less likely to repair, resell or keep it.
In their regular business activities, Own is actively fighting against office chairs becoming a source of pollution, aiming for full material transparency, circularity as the default standard and climate-neutral production in the coming years. The ultimate logic of the research and exhibition is simple: an object that people see as disposable equipment is treated as disposable equipment, while an object that people see as design is more likely to live a longer life.
