Live life unframed Friday, 18 February 2011 23:05

Doha: Herman Miller, leading global provider of furniture and office services with regional headquarters in Dubai, has unveiled its latest design, the SAYL family of work and side chairs. Working in collaboration with renowned Swiss-born and San Franscico-based designer Yves Béhar, SAYL provides an unprecedented sense of freedom, delivering best in class comfort at an attainable price.

A regular collaborator with Herman Miller, Béhar is known for pushing the boundaries of technology, and with SAYL, he has created a design that offers Herman Miller premium brand heritage at an attainable price. This, as Jack Schreur, VP of Seating for Herman Miller notes, includes: “healthy ergonomics, material and performance advances, our comprehensive 12-year warranty, and as always, environmental responsibility. What’s surprising is how attainable we’ve made SAYL.”

Robert Keddie, Regional Director – Middle East & Africa says:"Herman Miller has a great legacy of bringing design led ergonomics to the MEA region and the launch of SAYL continues that tradition. The range makes Herman Miller design innovation more attainable than ever before, allowing us to penetrate new areas of the market and reach people who have been unable to fulfill the aspiration of owning our products before.

"With a strong regional headquarters in Dubai, serving the Middle East and Africa, coupled with an extensive and growing dealer network, we are able to serve all areas of this exciting and rapidly developing market."

In the early design stages, Yves Béhar’s aim was to enable an unprecedented sense of freedom for the sitter in a design that delivers the most comfort with the fewest materials. “We watched how people sit and work,” says Béhar. “We did over a thousand sketches. We built over 70 prototypes. We re-examined everything from back construction to the smallest knobs.”

Béhar’s inspiration for the design of SAYL came from studying the design of suspension bridges. He explored whether the same principles used to suspend a bridge over water can be applied to a chair. This led Béhar to create the first full-suspension back that is literally frameless. With no rigid exterior frame, the back suspends and supports, in the same way as a suspension bridge does.

This signature innovation of the 3D Intelligent™ suspension back lets the chair adapt to a person’s shape and movements, whilst giving comprehensive support and, as Bill Dowell, Herman Miller Corporate Ergonomist notes, “supports the transition area from the thorax to the lumbar and again between the thorax and the sacrum allowing the area in between to flex and adapt to each individual’s spine”.

Béhar and the Herman Miller development team took a radical approach to the design process by considering what could be taken away from the design that would allow it to do more. This eco-dematerialised™ approach sought to remove any unnecessary components, yet still deliver a high level of performance and aesthetics at an attainable price. The process of elimination also had the beneficial effect of reducing the environmental impact. Béhar’s eco-dematerialised™ approach uses fewer materials in inventive ways, resulting in a physically lighter chair that is subsequently cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

Herman Miller is able to reduce SAYL’s CO2 footprint further by manufacturing the chairs on three continents; thus decreasing the distance between factory and buyer. The chair design upholds the comprehensive Herman Miller Design for the Environment protocol, ensuring that the minimal materials used in its manufacture are sustainable.

SAYL’s understated design gives it a sense of humility which will appeal to a broad range of industries and is suitable for multiple environments. SAYL is the latest development from a host of Herman Miller design partnerships. The office furniture manufacturer has a rich heritage which includes groundbreaking designs such as Aeron chair, Equa chair, and Leaf light. Yves Béhar is one of an elite group of designers who have collaborated with Herman Miller; others include Bill Stumpf, Charles and Ray Eames, and Isamu Noguchi.