On Prototyping: The Simplest Solution Never Comes First

The general point of the article rings true with me. An early prototype helps pinpoint the hotspots of complexity, which were probably not at all obvious in the design stage. I have run into this with my programming. I tend to start out with an overly-complicated model, and whittle away extraneous junk which do not improve flexibility or expressive power.

Now about chairs. I find the general idea fascinating --- the Holy Grail of chair design conforms to the user with no adjustments and stays there with no special use of the user's muscles (for example, there should be no need to fiddle with a tilt limiter or tilt tension; I should be able to just sit back at precisely the angle I want right now, and the chair should stay there; if I change my sitting angle, the chair should follow and stay in the new position). If this Setu chair does this, fantastic. It certainly pushes the envelope of task chair design by providing bases different from the usual 5-tentacle rolling octopus, a strong point in its favor.

The article says that this group produced the Mirra. I hope it learned from its mistakes with the Mirra, which has an uncomfortably hard and inflexible back. Strangely, Herman-Miller's web site lists the Setu chair in its "multipurpose" category, not its "work" category. I'll reserve judgement until I find a place to try it out, but it's hard to do worse than the uncomfortable Celle, or the Embody (ugly, heavy, outrageously expensive, and not even comfortable). The Aeron remains the gold standard, but it is starting to look a little dated (in a nice way, I suppose), and it does require a decent amount of fiddling.