The Next One | 2019-2021
From left, a replica of George Sawyer’s Perch, The Considered Assistant, The Next One, and The Next One_ Big Box Vernacular
Just before Xmas I managed to aggravate an old back injury which put me out of action for over a week. While visiting a physiotherapist in Woodend I asked him his opinion on the best seating position for me whilst I recovered. He responded immediately, ‘the next one.’
-Glenn Rundell_ chair maker
The task chair held my torso like a back brace I’d never been prescribed. I settled in to the sore, stiff, weak, familiar feeling of office brought on atrophy. I had interned there for three months and I was twenty-two years old.
Much to my parents’ dismay, my long history with and addiction to BMX (bicycle motocross), had led to a wide array of injuries. Broken arms, ribs, hand, and leg, torn ACL’s, dozens of stitches. Yet I had not ever thought those activities were killing me. But there I sat in my office chair, poised in a position of utter inactivity, and I felt like I was dying.
My right hand post surgery to fix what is commonly referred to as “boxers’ fracture.”
The prospect of a normal, professional, aspirational career brought a guarantee of security but not comfort, certainly not health. The degradation of my body in those three short months foreshadowed a future I could not get myself to bear.
Two years, a college graduation, and half of a recession later, I found myself working in a machine shop in conditions and manners that by contemporary standards would be considered drudgery. I felt better than I ever had. I found myself sore after work. Not during it. Gone was the atrophy. Gone was the chair shaped back brace. Gone was sitting.
The feeling of weakness had been replaced with one of strength. The hunch in my shoulders had been replaced with a stance of pride and better posture. And the nagging pain in my stomach, for which I had feared chronic illness, had been long forgotten. It is of great irony that my new found job, which literally contained the word machine in its title, had made me feel more human.
For 5 years I worked making forklift parts, none of which was ever descriptive enough in its design or name to hint at its final function. It was hard, hot, loud, and smelly. However it was not back breaking. The turning of vise handles and allen wrenches gave my hands strength they had never felt. The carrying of coolant buckets and parts bins translated into core and leg strength which no amount of BMX could ever have created on its own. It was work. And though it didn’t make my wallet feel right, my body had never felt better.
The shift in careers from machinist to adjunct instructor had left me in the shop much less, and sitting much more, but the class with George Sawyer brought back the feelings of real work.
I noticed the odd little stool peaking out from underneath the longer of the two workbenches. It wasn’t so much as in storage as conveniently placed out of the way to not take up any of the precious little floor space.
“What’s this?” I asked, as I pulled it out and looked it over.
“Oh, the perch?!,” George let out with his infectious excitement he showed over many of the things in his shop full of treasures. “Peter Galbert and Curtis Buchanan designed that in partnership with someone who does research into ergonomics.”
The perch and the form it took were new to me, filling me with excitement and curiosity. Though a concept not of his own, I was certain this particular example was George’s personal take, as the turnings were clearly of his style.
As I sat down in the perch, I was put in a position I had never felt before. My hips rolled forward, my feet planted soundly into the floor, and my spine curved in a way I had only seen in anatomical illustrations. My new found posture and bodily position made me immediately aware of who this unnamed researcher was.
Earlier on in this very same trip, while in a hotel in Rhode Island, I had finished reading The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design, by Galen Cranz.
A particular quote from the book came immediately to mind. “The optimal solution is not a better design of the components of the chair itself, but rather reconfiguration of the chair itself to allow a fundamental change in posture.”
I was certain that this design was her research made manifest in physical form.
The first perches I ever sat on, in George Sawyer’s father Dave’s home shop in Vermont. Photo courtesy of sawyer-made Instagram.
How should we sit / should we sit at all?
In a quest for efficiency I kept coming back to my experiences working in an office setting.
Sure my supportive chair task chair made me more productive at my computer. But its adverse affects on my body didn’t cease when I went home at night.
The quantitative costs would be hard to measure. If I had stayed in that job for my whole life would it have lead to increased medical costs down the road? Blood clots, weight gain, back problems, loss of flexibility...
The qualitative costs were clear however. While the work was interesting, the stagnation it required was lowering my quality of life, both in the office and out.
Sore back, sore wrists, sore...guts?
However difficult to totally count, I determined the costs to my health far outweighed the benefits I could possibly make to my employer.
On a search for research that challenged what I had always thought of as “ergonomic,” I stumbled across the work of Galen Cranz. In her book, The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design. She specifically mentions all of the symptoms I had developed in my short time in that office years before. The answers were surprisingly simple, and I had already discovered many of them through intuition, avoiding the office at all costs.
The postures which we employ are in desperate need of change. When we think of a typical day, next to lying down while sleeping, we spend most of our time sitting. Is this humane? Is it even human?
Galen Cranz’s book, The Chair, Retinking Culture, Body, and Design, became my guiding light.
December 2018 | Vermont
While in Vermont I sat on George Sawyer’s version of the Perch, originally designed in collaboration between Galen Cranz, and the windsor chair makers Peter Galbert and Curtis Buchanan.
November 2020 Rhode Island
It was not until deciding to revisit this alternative mode of seating two years later, that I decided to make a George Sawyer perch of my own, forming a baseline to go from.
January 2019 | Ohio
In response to sitting on the Perch in Vermont, I immediately designed and made what I called the Assistant. Taking some of the ideas embedded within the Perch to the extreme, the I considered the Assistant to be a crossover between sitting and standing...though I knew it needed work.
December 2020 | Rhode Island
I could not forget the advice Glenn Rundell’s physiotherapist had given him. Why had the solutions I had sat in, emulated, and attempted to tweak, not afforded their user’s this next
one? I set out to make a seat that afforded at least 3 distinct postures...maybe many more, none of which would be what we have come to think of as “normal.”