Steelcase offers workers a personalized and unique experience with its new SILQ chair that revolutionizes work comfort

With 105 years of existence, Steelcase has helped creating great experiences for leading organizations around the world, wherever work takes place. Steelcase and its brands family offer a broad portfolio of solutions, products and services designed to enhance the commitment of workers and support social, economic and environmental sustainability.

The company has launched SILQ, a new seating model that promises to transform the world of seating design. Through an innovation in materials science, a process whose patent is in progress, Steelcase designers and engineers have created a new high-performance, lightweight and rigid polymeric material that imitates the qualities of carbon fiber but with a market price. This material, combined with the sensual curves of the design, makes SILQ respond to the natural movements of the human body without using the typical mechanisms of the work chairs. The result is a prototype that behaves more like an organism than a machine, a new archetype in office chairs.

The process of creating SILQ

According to James Ludwig, vice president of Global Design and Product Engineering, “the idea behind SILQ comes from our deep knowledge of design. The visual language, performance and composition of the materials combine perfectly to create something totally unique. To carry out this design -Ludwig points out-, we are inspired, among other things, in the aerospace industry, in the movement of a high-performance leg prosthesis and in sculpture, to understand how the combination of advanced materials and their design can create a prototype that is incredibly thin, extremely strong and highly receptive. “

To conceive this model, Ludwig and his team looked for a totally new way of designing a chair. They imagined the replacement of the hundreds of pieces that are necessary for a fully adjustable work chair, by a simple system where the material itself becomes the adjustment mechanism. First, the team created a premium version of SILQ in carbon fiber, but they realized that they needed to go further to reach mass production. They continued to create prototypes and invented a new material and manufacturing process that resulted in a high performance polymer that behaves like carbon fiber. “The way SILQ is shaped, what it is made of and how it works are inseparable,” explains Ludwig. “We extended the limits of material science and the material became the mechanism itself.“

SILQ has been designed for the contemporary ways of working. The workers move continuously from one place to another and it is increasingly strange that they sit in an assigned position throughout the day. People have less time to adjust the mechanisms and need a chair that is intuitive to use. The way in which SILQ responds to the posture and stature of a person is unique for each user due to the way in which materials, design and movement of the human body converge. Height is the only adjustment necessary for a unique and personalized experience.

“Anyone who tries SILQ finds it comfortable, no matter where or how they are working, and that what makes it simple” adds Ludwig.

The chair can be purchased in this new high-performance polymer, as well as in carbon fiber. The initial catalog price of $970 will be available in North America in the spring of 2018 and in Europe, the Middle East and Africa by the end of 2018.

Source: Steelcase
Read more news related Steelcase published at Infurma
Visit the AF Steelcase website
Visit the AF Steelcase sheet at Infurma