The ancient Greeks made chairs with curved backrests, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that ergonomics, the study of people in their workplace undertaken to improve efficiency and welfare, was heartily embraced by industrial designers. That’s when Herman Miller brought on the American designer Bill Stumpf, who’d worked with medical experts while doing his postgraduate study at the University of Wisconsin to conduct studies on ideal sitting posture that incorporated X-rays and time-lapse photography. I
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