Knoll’s Generation office chairs have garnered quite a bit of notice this year in the business and technology sector. The seating was featured in both Wired Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Unlike many office chairs that hold a user in a fairly fixed position, Generation is designed to support workers effortlessly as they bend, twist, and stretch. Formway Design, the firm that developed this chair for Knoll, reputedly spent a huge amount of time watching video of white collar workers to discover how they tend to move and shift around when seated. The result is a chair that moves with the sitter.

The back is made of a flex material wrapped on a figure 8 frame. The seat back can flex from side to side in response to a worker’s twisting shoulders. If you want to sit sideways on the chair and prop an arm along the back – that works too. The top edge of the seat back actually curls down under pressure to form an impromptu armrest. The regular armrests move automatically with you to accommodate a side sitting posture without getting in the way. The seat itself features Dynamic Suspension to counterbalance the sitter’s body weight when leaning backward or forward.

This isn’t the last you’ll be hearing about Knoll’s seating. At NeoCon, they introduced ReGeneration – the latest update on their original design.