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Herman Miller tries to cash in on our activity-tracking obsession
We already know that sitting all day damages our health, and plenty of companies have tried to do something about it. Now, furniture maker Herman Miller is getting in on the action with a line of smart furniture sensors called Live OS.
Herman Miller's tiny C2 creates office micro-climates
Battling over control of the office thermostat / air conditioning tends to be a passive aggressive flashpoint in any place of work, so even though this will undoubtedly set off some environmental alarms, the C2 climate control definitely fills a niche. Replacing the role of a regular personal fan, the C2 from Herman Miller allows users to adjust the surrounding temperature up to a 40 degree increase, and an 8 degree decrease, taking 72 degrees F (22 degrees C) as the starting temperature. The aforementioned environmental issues does raise the question of how far this technology should go, especially since office unity can't be that great if an issue as trivial as temperature can't be agreed upon. Still, we're not one to complain about having things easier in our work environments: not that we'd know anything about working in an office.[Via Reuters]
Herman Miller planning "desk of the future"
High-end furniture maker Herman Miller looks to be doing its best to cut down on the ever-increasing nuisance of gadget clutter, with Reuters reporting that the company has licensed Fulton Innovation's eCoupled technology to let you recharge various electronic devices simply plopping them down on your (presumably pricey) desk. The technology (shown here in decidedly Herman Miller-form) works by transferring power through a magnetic field that'll charge anything that comes in contact with it; we assume it also involves some sort of adapter for your respective devices. Of course, cordless charging isn't an entirely new concept, with HP recently showing off some of its own ideas for juiced-up furniture, and Splashpower talking up its charge-on-contact system for a few years now. We guess we'll just have to wait and see if this new power-happy desk becomes the same status symbol for the Web 2.0 crowd that Herman Miller's Aeron chair was back in Web 1.0 days -- assuming we haven't moved on to Web 3.0 by the time the desk actually comes out, that is.[Via textually.org]
Bill Stumpf, creator of the Aeron chair, passes away at 70
To all you dot-commers who spent tons of money on truckloads of Aeron Ergonomic Office Chairs back in the day, please stand up and salute Bill Stumpf, who died late last month at the age of 70. This industrial designer was made famous by his 1994 Aeron chair, which has made the drudgery of an eight hour work day a fair bit more bearable -- and likewise continues to make 16-hour Engadget workdays roll on for Pete and Ryan. Even from the beginning Stumpf's chef d'oeuvre earned it a place in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one month before it was released to the public at a trade show in September 1994. More recently, in an interview with The New York Times, Bill Dowell, a former partner of Stumpf's at Herman Miller, recalled that Stumpf delayed production of the first Aeron chair by a whole year because a woman testing the chair had to get up to adjust it. Stumpf will be posthumously presented with the National Design Award in Product Design on October 18 in New York.[Thanks, Veronica]
