The chair that changed the way the world sits

Bob King is Founder and CEO of Humanscale, the leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance ergonomic products from seating to height-adjustable desks. A true visionary, Bob, set out to create products that enhance and support the human condition at work, whilst driving efforts to leave a legacy of responsible design and manufacturing. 

In 1998, Bob King and Niels Diffrient began working together, a collaboration that would disrupt the office-chair sector with the launch of Freedom, Liberty and Diffrient World. 

For decades, workplace chairs restricted movement due to their complicated manual controls and knobs – in fact less than 2% of people know how to operate their office task chairs. It’s also well-known that prolonged sitting is detrimental to health. In 1999, Niels Diffrient addressed this real-life problem, by creating the Freedom chair for Humanscale. This innovative chair allows users, regardless of body type, to sit and move freely whilst being fully supported, without any need for adjustments.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Freedom chair transformed workplace chair design by replacing the traditional locks, knobs, and springs with a mechanism that ingeniously uses the sitter’s body weight and the laws of physics. As a result, Freedom chair users can effortlessly and spontaneously shift positions, making it feel custom-made for anyone who sits in it.

In this talk Bob will use the ground-breaking Freedom chair, to showcase Niels’s design approach to create a unique and timeless products. It is a testament to his genius, that Freedom remains just as relevant today, if not more, than when it was conceived 25 years ago. It has become the chair of choice amongst the world's most influential and global elite, from Barack Obama to the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, to the NASA control room and even TV shows like Succession. In short, it’s the chair that changed the way the world sits