Topic: The tyranny of chairs: why we need better design
The tyranny of chairs: why we need better design
let’s face the considerable evidence that all sitting is harmful,” writes Galen Cranz, a design historian whose book The Chair traces this object’s long history. Not all sitting, of course. For people who use wheelchairs, they’re an elegant and crucial technology. And sitting itself is not the culprit; any unchanging, repetitive motion or posture fails to give the body the variation it needs. But Cranz, writing primarily for an audience of ambulatory readers in industrialised and therefore sedentary societies, is one of many researchers who have been saying for decades that chairs are a major cause of pain and disability.Get more news about Modern Training Chair,you can vist our website!
Sitting for hours and hours can weaken your back and core muscles, pinch the nerves of your rear end and constrain the flow of blood that your body needs for peak energy and attention. Most people’s bodies are largely unsuited to extended periods in these structures. Extensive research confirms that sitting in chairs is correlated, Cranz notes, with “back pain of all sorts, fatigue, varicose veins, stress and problems with the diaphragm, circulation, digestion, elimination and general body development”. There is growing evidence that relentlessly sedentary jobs – in some, such as bus driving and forklift operating, bodies are literally strapped to chairs – are harmful enough to shorten life expectancy.
For most of human history, a mix of postures was the norm for a body meeting the world. Squatting has been as natural a posture as sitting for daily tasks, and lying down was a conventional pose for eating in some ancient cultures. So why has sitting in chairs persisted in so many modern cultures? As with all material objects, Cranz reminds us, function tells only part of the story. The other part, always, is culture – the inherited and sometimes arbitrary ways that things have always been done, and therefore continue as common practice. “Biology, physiology and anatomy have less to do with our chairs than pharaohs, kings and executives,” she writes.
One kind of historical chair, called the “klismos” by historians, developed primarily as a historical expression of status. Setting a body higher than and apart from other people, in an individual structure with rigid, flat planes – a throne, if you will – evolved as a way of recognising an individual’s power, with the earliest known models dating to ancient Egypt and south-eastern Europe. Their use as an expression of authority continued throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the endurance of this symbolism lives on as metaphor in many contemporary leadership titles; to chair the committee or the department, or to sit in the designated “director’s chair” on a film set, is still to hold a seat of power.
In the centuries prior to western industrialisation, stools or benches were common household furnishings, but chairs were special-occasion objects, usually the exclusive property of the wealthy and powerful. The era of mass manufacturing in the 19th century, and the rapid social and economic changes that came with it, brought chairs into daily life for the first time. Industrial jobs, with their repetitive tasks, required a seated posture, and the high demand for chairs that this created in turn made them available and affordable to middle-class people in Europe and the US.
“Chair-and-table culture,” Cranz writes, has become fully entrenched in many parts of the world since then. Modern interior designers have done their part to perpetuate chairs as a fashionable and practical norm, reinventing the form again and again in its aesthetics, though not nearly enough in its ergonomics. Chairs are four-legged creatures with anatomical backs and bottoms, familiar to humans because they stand up, almost like animals, beckoning us with their lifelike structures to sit down. Cranz notes that they appeal to humans, and perhaps especially designers, with this blend of the “architectonic and the anthropomorphic”: they are structurally interesting and an echo of the body itself.
But while they remind us of the human form, chairs rarely do much to actually support it. For instance, many chair designs feature big, soft cushions that seem to indicate comfort, but in ergonomics, the consensus contradicts this padded aesthetic. Cranz writes that “an overpadded chair forces the sit bones to rock in the padding rather than make contact with a stable surface, thereby forcing the flesh in the butt and thighs to bear weight”.