Business
& Labor
Bill Stumpf, Creator of the Aeron Chair, Dies
(archrecord.construction.com - 10/30/2006)
By Phil
Patton
Bill Stumpf will forever be associated
with the Aeron chair, that totem of the dot.com boom of the
1990s. But no designer was less faddish than Stumpf, who died
August 30 in Rochester, Minnesota, at the age of 70.
Stumpf designed the ergonomic Aeron
for Herman Miller in 1994, working with Don Chadwick. Eric
Chan of Ecco Design, who worked with Stumpf on several projects,
called him “a design giant, a deep thinker, a cultural
visionary, and good friend, mentor, and teacher.” In
addition to the Aeron, Chan says, “the Ergon and Equa
chairs, also the Ethospace office system, were each breakthrough
designs when they were introduced. His impact on the lives
of millions of office workers was huge.”
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Stumpf was born in St. Louis and was
educated at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
His innovations in ergonomic design began with hard-core knowledge
of orthopedic and vascular science, which he gained at the
University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s. He went to work
for Herman Miller in 1970, then two years later established
his own firm, Stumpf, Weber & Associates, in Minneapolis.
He produced the Equa chair for Herman Miller in 1976; some
have characterized it as the first modern ergonomic work chair.
The Ethospace office system, done with Jack Kelley, make serious
refinements to cubical partitioning systems, which were just
starting to become ubiquitous. Ethospace also pioneered wire
management at the dawn of the personal computing age. Years
ahead of its time, it came out in 1984—the year of the
first Macintosh computer.
The Aeron chair exemplified Stumpf’s
constant return to the basics of a problem: “I work best
when humbled,” he once said. The Aeron became a literal
metaphor for the best qualities of network thinking—flexibility,
transparency, and adaptability. Those very qualities defined
the designer’s singular rigor.
Stumpf won the 2006 National Design
Award for product design, presented after his death by the
Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
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