The Ergonomic Office Chair is a Failure

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

It may seem out of touch to call a product that has generate over $100 billion in sales a failure, but sales are only one measure of success. In fact, the office chair has failed to improve either the health or productivity of those who must sit at desks for most of their day. This uncomfortable reality has been carefully overlooked by the office chair industry, but the problem hasn’t gone away. As a result, alternatives to the standard ergonomic office chair are emerging: standing desks, treadmill desks, and more innovative chair designs are all contending to improve the lives of those who sit for many hours each day.

About fifty years ago the modern ergonomic office-chair entered our work space based on an appealing and seemingly obvious proposition: if sitting all day was uncomfortable, the answer must be a more supportive chair. Add a backrest, pad the seat, support the arms, support the head, push in on the lumbar spine, and then add levers to adjust everything. The expectation was that with enough engineering sitting could be made both comfortable and healthy.

This approach certainly made sitting more expensive. It’s estimated is that a billion ergonomic office chairs have been manufactured since 1976, at a cost of over $100 billion. And the spending continues. Americans still buy an estimated 30 million office chairs every year for about $10 billion. This seems like a lot of money, but costs pile up fast when an office chair can cost over $1,000. And while these numbers are approximate, they make it clear that the ergonomic chair industry is immense and spectacularly successful at selling its chairs.

So much money, for so many chairs, over so many years. Surely by now there’s evidence that these efforts lead to better posture, less back pain, and a more efficient workplace.

Actually, there isn’t. And we’ve been here before.

A Short History of Big Tobacco and Big Oil

In the 1950's tobacco companies became aware that smoking was deadly, but rather than face the end of their industry they hired public relations firm that for decades obfuscated, falsely claiming that the science wasn't settled.¹ Similarly, when the oil industry became aware of its contribution to catastrophic climate change its executives chose prevarication over economic ruin.² While it may be comforting to interpret this history as simply bad people behaving badly, the real dynamic is more mundane: Big businesses typically act in their own interests rather than those of their customers. When a profitable industry finds evidence that threatens its core product the response isn’t curiosity or research. Rather the play is delay and doubling down on the status quo.

Big Chair’s Big Claims

The first blockbuster office chair, the Aeron, came out in 1994 but had an origin story rather less scientific than Herman Miller’s came to claim. Co-designer Don Chadwick was an industrial designer with no background in ergonomics, and later described his assignment from Herman Miller quite simply: “We were given a brief and basically told to design the next-generation office chair”. Sometime later A. C. Mandal, a Danish physician who had spent decades studying sitting, visited the company and ruefully observed: “The Aeron is far too low. They did understand. It should have allowed much greater height adjustment, and you should be able to move more in the chair. But as long as they sell enormous numbers, they don’t want to change it”³. From the outset, it seems, the emphasis was on sales rather than science.

From these humble design roots “Big Chair” went on to make some remarkable promises about what its chairs could do for us. In 2003, Steelcase claimed that its Leap chair increased productivity by 18% and “paid for itself in less than ten working days”; a 2016 brochure claimed reductions in musculoskeletal disorders and absenteeism. Herman Miller has made claims no less ambitious: in 2008 they claimed “improved blood flow, a lower resting heart rate, and more focused thinking”, and even suggested their chair could reduce cardiovascular disease risk. In 2016, the company said Aeron’s support pads helped “strengthen the spine”; it also claimed their Cosm chair was “the only chair known to reduce cognitive load.”

Unfortunately, none of these claims are supported by evidence. For example, the Big Chair funded study that showed its chair was less uncomfortable than the control chair did so by comparing it to a wooden chair the researchers expected to be uncomfortable.⁴ Another study found modest differences in pressure and local tissue perfusion among some chair materials. ⁵. These are plausible findings, but they do not begin to prove that a chair prevents disease or makes its occupant more comfortable or creative. The claim that Steelcase made to reduce absenteeism is particularly flagrant because the associated analysis actually reported no effect on sick-leave hours.⁶ Also easily debunked, Big Chair’s claims that their chairs can reduce back pain. Peer reviewed studies find only low quality conflicting evidence that any chair can reduce back pain, and conclude that chair interventions "are not recommended" for this purpose⁷.

So Big Chair’s vanishingly thin research portfolio has forced their marketing departments’ to spin narrow findings into broad promises of comfort, health, productivity, and cost savings.

What Big Chair knows

The major office-chair companies have spent decades designing chairs, watching customers as they use them, and working with corporate ergonomists. So, they are well aware that the claims made by their marketing departments are fanciful. Further, they surely know that the claimed science behind their chairs doesn’t exist, because the peer-reviewed literature is easily available to anyone with a university library card.

And actually, we know that Big Chair is aware of problems caused by sitting, because they’ve told us so. The industry has responded to revelations of the harms of sitting⁸ by selling a succession of new products pitched as solutions. Notably absent, however, has been sponsorship of any peer reviewed research that might threaten their market dominance. While a host of “white papers” from Big Chair companies have been produced, these appear only on websites where they are immune to the peer review process. Companies have also avoided clinical outcome testing because surrogate results, (comfort, preference, posture) can be pitched as “ergonomic research” without risking an overthrow of the basic concept of the maximally supportive ergonomic chair. The result has been decades of health-oriented promises without any real health-outcome evidence.

While there is a clear structural parallel with Big Tobacco, tobacco companies went far beyond simply overlooking emerging evidence; internal documents later showed that they understood the cancer risk by the late 1950s but went on to fund research intended to prolong the debate.⁹ Ergonomic chairs are not cigarettes, and the harms caused by sitting are far less than those of smoking. But the incentives are similar: when a profitable product depends on consumers continuing to believe a reassuring story, actual research becomes a risk. Big Chair does not need to prove that their elaborate supported chairs improve health. Far better to avoid the question and continue selling more of the same chairs. As Upton Sinclare observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Why Not Try Something New?

And it’s not that Big Chair isn’t aware of more innovative alternatives. For example, a decade ago a modest chair company, Fully, began to popularize active sitting, going so far as running a Super Bowl ad. Then in 2019 Knoll/Herman Miller bought Fully, promising to preserve its “spirited, independent brand identity”. But by 2023 Fully was shut down, and all its active chair designs vanished from the market. David Kahl, Fully’s founder, was devastated to see his life work come to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Why would Big Chair pay for a suite of alternatives to conventional chairs, only to then quietly discontinued all of them? We can’t know the internal deliberations, but from the outside this seems to have been a catch and kill exercise, designed to remove active sitting options from the marketplace, clearing the way for massive chair companies to sell more of the design that had proved so profitable without facing the expense and disruption that might come with better chairs.

Big Chair solved the wrong problem

Conventional ergonomic chairs begin with the assumption that the body should be stabilized in one preferred posture. Their elaborate backrests, lumbar bulges, armrests, headrests, cushions, and adjustment mechanisms are all intended to make prolonged stillness sustainable. But posture is not a position that can be perfected and held indefinitely¹⁰; posture is a constantly changing response to gravity and the needs arising from our muscles and joints: Muscles require engagement to help modulate the body’s metabolic activity^{11 12}, and joints require movement to circulate synovial fluid that support cartilage metabolism. The human body must move to stay healthy and vital. Any static posture quickly becomes a detrimental posture when maintained for any length of time. As ergonomists, and physical therapists now understand, “The next posture is the best posture”. Additionally, there is strong epidemiological evidence that sitting still can shorten lives by as much as two years.¹³

Ergonomic office chair designs have succeeded in making immobility comfortable enough to seem sustainable, but its real success has been commercial, a win for the companies that manufacture and market increasingly elaborate chairs. But it has not been a win for their customers. For work-a-day folks sitting at their desks, the promised health benefits never arrive.

It is time to ask a different question

For fifty years, chair designers have asked, “How can we support the body so completely that people will be so comfortable that they won’t need to move?” Unfortunately, the question should have been, “How can a chair allow people to move naturally while they work?”

A billion chairs and over $100 billion later, it’s clear that the ergonomic chair’s fundamental failure has not poor engineering. Rather, it was engineering in the service of the wrong goal. The question shouldn’t have been whether a chair can make sitting less uncomfortable. Rather, the question should have been whether a chair can make sitting healthier. We need to move beyond chairs that impose a single posture and instead create chairs that allow people to move naturally, finding their own best posture moment by moment. Naturally.

This story isn’t over. For decades a few companies have offered chairs that make sitting actively seem natural, even enjoyable. Designs from CoreChair in Canada, Swopper and MiShu in Germany, and QOR360 in the USA are all different, but each of these designs seamlessly adds movement to sitting. And companies offering other innovative chair designs continue to emerge.

Because sitting isn’t a settled subject, new and better chair designs will continue to appear. Big Chair companies long ago settled in on a single, massively profitable design, and have dug in because it would be awkward to abandon a design they have heavily so promoted; the industry is a prisoner of its advertising legacy. But as the evidence for harms caused by passive sitting continues to grow, buyers will eventually ask the obvious question: is this chair is good for me?

The current ergonomic office chair has produced chairs designed for maximal support for decades. But humans are designed for movement, so perhaps it’s time to move on to designs that support movement. Naturally.

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References

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² Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., & Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil's global warming projections. Science, 379(6628), eabk0063. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk0063 (Original source link: PubMed).

³ Cohen, A. (2010, April 29). Your office chair is killing you. Bloomberg Businessweek. Article reprint.

⁴ Weston, E., Le, P., & Marras, W. S. (2017). A biomechanical and physiological study of office seat and tablet device interaction. Applied Ergonomics, 62, 83–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2017.02.013 (Original source link: PubMed).

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⁶ Steelcase. (2016, August). Leap seating [Brochure, 16-E0000180]. https://www.steelcase.com/content/uploads/sites/10/2018/10/Leap-Brochure-EMEA_EN.pdf.

⁷ Channak, S., Klinsophon, T., & Janwantanakul, P. (2022). The effects of chair intervention on lower back pain, discomfort and trunk muscle activation in office workers: a systematic review. International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 28(3), 1722–1731. https://doi.org/10.1080/10803548.2021.1928379 (Original source link: PubMed).

⁸ van der Ploeg, H. P., Chey, T., Korda, R. J., Banks, E., & Bauman, A. (2012). Sitting time and all-cause mortality risk in 222 497 Australian adults. Archives of Internal Medicine, 172(6), 494–500. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinternmed.2011.2174 (Original source link: PubMed).

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¹⁰ Slater, D., Korakakis, V., O'Sullivan, P., Nolan, D., & O'Sullivan, K. (2019). "Sit Up Straight": Time to Re-evaluate. Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, 49(8), 562–564. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2019.0610 (Original source link: PubMed).

¹¹ Hamilton, M. T., Hamilton, D. G., & Zderic, T. W. (2007). Role of low energy expenditure and sitting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Diabetes, 56(11), 2655–2667. https://doi.org/10.2337/db07-0882 (Original source link: PubMed).

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