::: VERCO Office Furniture. Intelligent Seating and Desking.

news

request catalogues

opportunities

using this site

location

ergonomics and buying the right furniture

case studies

Our place of work is where we spend a good part of our time and must be as comfortable as possible. Office furniture and in particular office chairs play a vital role in ensuring a pleasant ambience in the workplace thanks to the ergonomic, elegant and comfortable designs that are replacing the concept of functionality that existed previously.

The design of Office Furniture has evolved over the last ten to fifteen years as a direct result of the increasing influence of IT on the Office environment and the changing functions of people within it. In the modern office functions such as faxing and filing can now be achieved without the user leaving their new 'workstation'. As a consequence of this changing behaviour within the office, personnel are becoming more and more static within the office as more and more functions can be achieved from the seated position via the PC.

The design of office seating has therefore had to change from simply providing comfortable chairs of various sizes, to the provision of a sophisticated tool that will provide dynamic posture support to the modern user in the many different tasks now required to be undertaken at the workstation. (Still prevalent among users however is the 'Throne Syndrome', where the importance of the user is thought, by the user, to be directly linked to the size of their chair and the additional features it may have; arms, height of the back support, leather upholstery etc.)

Office seating is often compared to the car seat in the way that each has evolved over recent years. Each form of seating however is attempting to achieve very different results. In a car the overall aim is to provide comfortable support, possibly for reasonably long periods of time, but which will hold the driver in one position at all times, even when he or she is subjected to large external forces when cornering at high speeds. Indeed a key design goal for the car seat designers is to prevent any possible lateral body movement. In other words the car seat has been designed to hold the driver in one fixed position at all times, in defiance of any external forces acting on the driver.

The office chair, on the other hand, operates in a benign environment, where external forces are minimal and one where the user adopts many different positions within the working day depending upon the activity being undertaken. Indeed in the modern office, there is a real danger of remaining in one position for long periods of time. The human body has been designed to move and a lack of movement is a widespread condition in our modern world which can cause illness. This is because sitting is hard work and static sitting in an incorrect posture can damage one's health. The more hunched the posture, the greater the pressure on the spinal column and the more work the trunk, neck and shoulder muscular systems have to do to maintain the posture.