Test your design IQ

MANILA, Philippines - Who was the American designer whose Ergon and Aeron chairs became the first design based on ergonomics, and forever changed the way people sit?

He was born in 1936 in St. Louis, and studied industrial design at the University of Illinois before going on to study environmental design at the University of Wisconsin.

This later influenced his most iconic works. “Everything goes back to those days at the University of Wisconsin,” he said about the postgraduate years he spent studying and teaching in the university’s Environmental Design Center. “Everything was about freeing up the body, designing away constraints.”

It was there that he worked with specialists in orthopedic and vascular medicine, and conducted special research on the way people sit — and the ways they should sit.

In 1974, Herman Miller commissioned him to apply his research on office sitting.  Two years later, the Ergon chair, the first ergonomic work chair, was introduced.

Later, in collaboration with Don Chadwick, he produced the groundbreaking Equa and iconic Aeron chairs.  The Aeron chair became an instant classic, chosen for the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1994.  He was also the principal designer of the Ethospace system.

A skilled innovator and something of a philosopher, he envisioned a world where design serves civility.  And yet, when he looked around, he saw design that too often “denies the human spirit” and “architecture that acknowledges money, not people.”

He addressed those issues in his 2000 book, The Ice Palace that Melted Away: Restoring Civility and Other Lost Virtues to Everyday Life. In it, he says that civility “is the something extra — comfort, hidden goodness, personal worth, helping others play —  the joy we take in our achievements and compassion we show toward our all too human faults.”

In his work for Herman Miller, he transformed the company’s approach to problem solving and research, and he also had a profound influence on the way people work in office environments     around the world.

He died in 2006, the same year was named the winner of the 2006 National Design Award in Product Design, an award presented posthumously by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Last week’s question: Who is the German product designer who together with his team in Braun was responsible for many of the seminal domestic electrical products — and some furniture — of the 20th century?

Answer: Dieter Rams

Winner: Anna Marie Marqueses of 2B Imus, Cavite

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Text your answer to 0905-3471998 with your name and address. One winner will be chosen through a raffle of texts with the correct answer. The winner will receive P2,000 worth of SM gift certificates for use at Our Home, SM Department Store, or SM Supermarket. They can claim their prize at Our Home in SM Megamall. Call the store manager at 634-1943. Bring photocopies of two valid IDs and a clipping of the Design Quiz issue in which you appear as winner.