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What auto interior people can learn from Herman Miller: let's face it, for years the office chair was nothing more than a commodity ... until Herman Miller produced the iconic Aeron. Maybe there is a lesson here.

Article Excerpt
The office chair. There's not much to it really-a back, seat cushion and strong legs upon which it is designed to support the body-which has made the seat little more than an afterthought for most of us, even though we spend countless hours each day sitting--either at a desk or conference table. To the developers and engineers at Herman Miller (www.hermanmiller.com), the chair is a tool that helps improve productivity, health and inspires creativity. For generations the Zeeland, Mi-based company has been reinventing the chair through innovative designs: the Ergon (1976), Equa (1984) and Aeron (1994).

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"Every ten to twelve years we set out to reinvent the task chair," says John Aldrich, Herman Miller's vice president of product development engineering, whose team spent more than four years creating their latest seating reinvention: the Embody. "We really started from scratch, especially when it...

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