The Perfect Seat

In April of last year, David Holmes, a professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, developed a formula for the perfect posterior. Using the equation (s + c) x (b + f) / t - v, Holmes claimed, you could account for the appeal of any female bottom, factoring in its shape (s), circularity (c), bounce (b), firmness (f), texture (t), and pertness (v). He also came up with a formula for the male derrière, but the media took little note, sticking to the Kylie Minogue angle on the story.

Holmes’s formula is actually quite intriguing. By applying a scientific equation to something as varied and unscientific as a tush, Holmes was attempting to systematize taste, creating an ideal through a sum of heretofore private parts. Of course, securing the formula for perfection isn’t Holmes’s quest alone. Most industries have their own methods for defining what is paragon, though not all are lucky enough to have them distilled into math.

Consider, for example, industrial designers. They shape everything from toothbrushes to aerodynamic nose cones — which, as the architectural historian Galen Cranz put it, once built, shape us. There is no one formula for understanding perfect design, but if there were, it might begin with the basic tenet that an object can be more than the sum of its functions. Much like a good bottom, we know good design when we see it. But what, exactly, makes for good chair design? In a world of imperfect bums, there must be science behind the designs for where we place them.

Not surprisingly, a chair’s parts are anthropomorphic: legs, backs, arms, and, of course, seats. The chair is one of the most versatile pieces of furniture in the Western world, yet it is easy to take for granted. In The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design, Cranz reminds us that though we spend much of our waking lives in chairs, we know little about them or their effects on us.

The earliest chair-like objects date back to 10,000 BC, to the age of flint tools and stone houses, when benches and ledges were used for sitting and sleeping. The oldest extant example of a chair hails from ancient Egypt and was uncovered in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, in the tomb of Tutankhamen. Two basic types of chairs have evolved since then, and they have been reworked over the ages: the throne, a straight-backed chair traditionally used by royalty and members of the upper class, and the clismos, a more modest, popular seat with a slightly inclined back, used by the hoi polloi.

Structural deviations from these two fundamental forms have depended mostly on social and geographic context, with things like construction materials, dimensions, and hierarchical function varying slightly from culture to culture. Assyrian carvings show frequent chair use by kings — their thrones supported by sculpted caryatids — but also in domestic settings, where specific seating arrangements were dictated by social rank. The Greeks of the fifth century BC are known for chairs with rigid perpendicular backs, celebrations of status over comfort. In the Victorian era, upholstered chairs, like women, wouldn’t dare reveal their “ankles,” and were thus draped in floorlength sleeves.

Today, marking a move toward function over form, comfort and use are the factors that preoccupy most designers. Kirsten White, a Toronto-based designer who has run her own company for over ten years, says, “Comfort is at the top of my list, especially when it comes to chairs, which we relate to so physically — almost like an article of clothing. You know in a second whether or not a chair is comfortable.” White’s teak Kattegat chair, with its sleek lines and slatted seat, can be found in the Getty Villa Malibu and the Tahoe Mountain Club in California. When it was first manufactured, by Rock Wood Casual Furniture in Oakville, Ontario, it branded her as a no-nonsense designer with an affection for traditional materials. White, who cites the Russian constructivists, the Bauhaus school, and the de Stijl movement as early influences, doesn’t hesitate when asked to name her favourite chair of all time. “The Eames lounge chair is the most comfortable wooden chair I have ever sat in, hands down,” she says with affection, calling it “ergonomically bang on.”

Donald A. Norman is a psychologist and design guru who has been studying human reactions to design for many years. In his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, he proposes three categories of reactions to designed objects. According to Norman, the highest response to design is at the reflective level. Contemplative and analytical, the reflective reaction is all about deciphering meaning from form — reading signs and symbols or perhaps having memories triggered. The meaning of cherry versus teak, the implications of Le Corbusier over Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, your secret desire to have a higher chair than your cubicle-mate — this level is about the intimate relationship you have with your seating.

The behavioural level, as Norman calls it, is the one that many chair designers rank at the top of their lists. It raises questions like: Is this chair comfortable? Is it performing as it should, whether for practical purposes such as typing or for sweet, end-of-day release? The behavioural level is where the centuries of innovation and reinterpretation of what makes a chair a chair shine through — where function is a priority.

Finally, there is the deep, dark, and nearly inexplicable visceral level. The visceral is what holds us in occasionally compromising sessions of lèche-vitrine (window-shopping, though its literal translation is window-licking), lusting after the perfect design.