Herman Miller is a problem-solving company. We identify, design, and develop innovative solutions to support new ways of working and contribute to the effectiveness of office environments. From Action Office to the Aeron chair, Herman Miller’s history of design has shaped today’s offices – and been widely copied.
1930 - 1960
Herman Miller’s dedication to research and original design began in the 1930s when designer Gilbert Rohde joined the company. Rohde had a central commitment to providing people with what they needed instead of what they were accustomed to. This was a revolutionary idea in an era when the main activity of the industry was manufacturing reproductions of period furniture.
Rohde developed a line of home furnishings that was honest, functional, and devoid of ornamentation or period affectation. His pieces were scaled to accommodate the smaller dwellings of the time. He saw signs of a changing, more mobile, more compact society and responded with furnishings to accommodate the changing life-styles. Rohde and Herman Miller were thus major contributors to revolutionising the look of American homes.
If Gilbert Rohde was the father of the design culture at Herman Miller, his successor, George Nelson, who affiliated with Herman Miller soon after Rohde’s death in 1944, made the culture flourish.
1960 - 1990
By 1960, information work had become the largest sector of the US economy, and information workers made up the largest portion of the US workforce. This raised the question whether the office workplace and the office worker could continue to use office and equipment configurations that had evolved largely by accident during the preceding century.
Robert Propst, the designer and inventor, thought not. He saw that the growing complexity of office work, accompanied by growing numbers of office workers, was awakening interest and concern about office productivity - a measurement previously applied chiefly to blue-collar output of tangible goods.
How, Propst asked, could information workers adapt more quickly to change? How could they become more efficient and effective? And how could the workplace itself be made more responsive to information workers and their work? His solution was the first ‘open plan’ office system, which was introduced in 1968 by Herman Miller under the name Action Office system.
While revolutionary, the innovation of the Action Office system, its use of vertical space, its concern for the individual user both as worker and human being, and its economy of design are directly traceable to the legacy of Gilbert Rohde, George Nelson, the Eameses, and others.
Now, well in excess of one million office workers worldwide occupy Herman Miller Action Office workstations, and imitators of Propst’s invention number in the hundreds.
And with the Ethospace concept of interior architecture with interchangeable elements, Herman Miller rewrote the book on the open office plan and white-collar productivity.
1990 - 2000
The company’s commitment to research and development is as strong as ever – here are just a couple of examples.
In the 1990s Herman Miller launched the Aeron chair, a totally new kind of workchair, later named ‘Design of the Decade’ by IDSA and Business Week. In-depth ergonomic research helped produce the Aeron’s unique design, which is available in 3 sizes to fit everyone perfectly, whatever their build, whatever their role. Over a decade later, the Aeron remains a bestseller, offering a level of comfort and performance that has yet to be equalled.
The year 2000 saw the launch of another ground-breaking product – the Resolve system, created by Turkish designer Ayse Birsel. Resolve does away with the frames and tiles of conventional systems, relying instead on a flexible infrastructure of poles and beams to form ‘constellations’ of workstations, contructed at 120 degree angles. Designed in response to the changing working patterns of recent years, Resolve redefines the workplace for the 21st century.
