The best designers create pieces of furniture that functional beautifully and appeal aesthetically. But often, the furniture these designers product is split into one of two categories: functional and design-led furniture.
Functional furniture
All furniture should be functional to some degree or it is, to all intents and purposes, useless, but there are instances where the need for practicality takes precedence over the aesthetics. School furniture, for example, is designed above all else to be comfortable and durable, due to its sustained use. It must also be cost-efficient, as it's likely to be purchased using public money. The same criteria applies to hospital furniture which must be high-functioning, comfortable and, most importantly, hygienic.
For more on innovative hospital furniture go to www.designbugsout.org.uk
Design studio PearsonLloyd has designed hospital that is easy to clean as part of the Design Bugs Out project. It has also worked on projects for Virgin Atlantic Airways and for manufacturers Bene, Knoll and Modus. Watch a film of Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd talking about their work
Read a transcript of this film
High-performance furniture
Task seating is the epitome of high-performance furniture. It is designed for use in offices or for home working and should be comfortable and kind to a sitter's back, which can suffer when you're sitting for a long period of time, often causing long-term health problems. The very best task seating will be ergonomically sound having been developed to mould to the needs and physical character of the sitter.
The Aeron chair designed in 1994 and manufactured by American furniture giant Herman Miller, is probably the world's most famous task chair combining aspirational design with pioneering ergonomics. The Aeron's designers', Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, aimed to make a chair that could fit its sitter (typically a knowledge worker who might spend eight hours sitting in front of a computer on a typical day at work) and so came up with a design that was biomorphic in form, like the human body. It has no upholstery, which was revolutionary at the time but is now much copied. Leading office furniture companies, such as Herman Miller, invest in extensive ergonomics research programmes to ensure that their products stay ahead of the competition. Substantial research also went into the creation of the Cobi chair for Steelcase, more recently designed by British product design team PearsonLloyd. It was developed on the premise that people change their postures continously and that chairs should promote movement allowing adjustments to be automatic and intuitive.
These modern ergonomically designed chairs aren’t just built to function. The Aeron is now part of the permanent collection in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Chairs can be signature pieces, design fetishes or as Wired magazine puts it ‘sculpture and utility in the same cool package.’
Which leads us on to look at more design-led furniture.