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Steelcase SILQ Chair Named Best of the Best by Red Dot Awards

The Steelcase® SILQ™ chair, a breakthrough in seating design, has won the Red Dot Award: Product Design 2019. The chair, created to respond intuitively to movement of the body, earned the Red Dot: Best of the Best, which the renowned jury only awards to products that feature an outstanding design.  

Tesla changed how we drive. Apple changed how we listen to music. Now, an innovation in materials science will change how we sit. Steelcase is introducing SILQ™ — a breakthrough in seating design that replaces the machinery typically found in office seating with a simple system. When James Ludwig, vice president of Global Design & Engineering for Steelcase, first sketched the concept for what later became SILQ,he sought something that acted more like an organism than a machine. He envisioned a chair that married visual artistry with a responsive material and an intuitive performance.

At the time of his initial sketch, technology and materials science hadn’t advanced far enough to allow his vision to become reality. Now, Ludwig’s design and engineering team has innovated to create a new material and process allowing them to share this aspirational design with the world. Ludwig joined 360 to tell us more about what led to the innovations behind SILQ.

360: What is it about SILQ that makes it so unique?

JL: The way it’s shaped, the way it performs and what it’s made out of are inseparable. To me, there’s a certain magic there. I find this to be the pinnacle of what design and engineering can do together.

Typical task chairs designed for people who need support at a desk all day have hundreds of parts. SILQ has 30. The idea of driving all of our complex motion into a simple design makes it move more like an organism. We took cues from biology. It’s intuitive. So, when you sit down, it adjusts to you. It moves the way you move. It’s tailored to respond to all the inputs you give it by simply sitting in SILQ. It’s like it knows you. We wanted to create a movement and a ride that was not just simple, but really countered people’s notions that they could feel good without thinking about it. There’s nothing to adjust on SILQ except height.

360: What inspired the first sketch of what is now SILQ?

JL: The intuition that led to the original sketch was really a design and engineering challenge. We were in search of über simplicity — replacing the machinery with more of an organism. But, we didn’t want to just cover up the mechanism or hide it, we wanted to eliminate it. We wanted the material to become the mechanism. At the time of the idea, technology and materials science just weren’t there yet. It wasn’t feasible, so the project sat on the shelf. Then, we began work to understand carbon fiber. And, we were able to launch the LessThanFive Chair which pushes the boundaries of material properties around lightness and stiffness.

I started thinking about the other properties of carbon fiber, namely used in the paralympic sprinters leg — which is the ultimate in durability, flexibility and responsiveness. I talked to my chief engineer — who is absolutely brilliant — and we agreed to pick the idea back up that has now become SILQ.

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