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Haworth designers Michael Welsh, Nicolai Czumaj-Bront and engineer Jason Hall were among the participants in the company’s collaborative design process for the Very Task Chair. The product war room brought all the necessary divisions and suppliers together to ensure the chair could meet designers’ expectations and still be made efficiently. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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HOLLAND — As soon as office furniture maker Haworth Inc. decided to build a new task chair, managers didn’t send off designers and engineers into their own silos. Instead, they created a war room and filled it with Haworth’s best designers, engineers and marketers and brought in outside materials expertise from trusted suppliers. Together, the team got down to the business of creating a new product.

What resulted from the process culminated in the war room sessions was the company’s Very Task Chair, which it debuted at the 2010 NeoCon World Trade Fair.

“In the past, the process was very compartmentalized. People would chime in not all at the front, but as the program went on,” Nicolai Czumaj-Bront, senior industrial designer, told MiBiz, noting the team faced major hurdles when new problems would arise late in the product development stage. This new design process helped solve that. “We had a room and we had industrial designers, product engineers, materials suppliers, (other) engineers and marketing involved up front from day one. We had checkpoints where we were constantly getting feedback and interaction. You learn things a lot quicker.”

With the whole team assembled, designers and engineers could discuss the challenges of particular elements of the product. If designers wanted a thin arm but the engineers knew that the parts wouldn’t hold up to customer use, then they could work toward solutions as a team and avoid some of the adversarial confrontations that had been common in past development cycles, he said. Since suppliers were also at the table, they could also help in suggesting new materials that might be able to hold up rather than sacking a design element prima facie. Or if the suppliers knew molding a suggested new part would pose problems, they could propose changes or tweaks to make it work.

“We were intimately involved in the development of the chair, and that’s something we pushed for early on,” Eric Johnson, design manager at Royal Technologies Corp., told MiBiz. “We want our influence on the design to improve its manufacturability. That works for Royal because we can supply the best back possible, and that works for Haworth.”

As a key supplier, Royal has been brought into the design process of other products in the past, especially when an OEM knows it will be breaking new ground with a product or process, Johnson said. Co-developing the product allows everyone involved to learn together, he added. Royal’s influence on the product can be seen in how the back attaches at the sides to the aluminum uprights, as well as the thickness and shape of the plastic pieces, but Haworth’s designers also challenged the supplier to put a difficult bend into the top of the chair.

The beauty of the open design process, Czumaj-Bront said, is that all people involved in the process help to make the end product better.

“Design is about process. It’s really a culmination. It’s about all these practices coming together,” he said.

Going into the project, the design team knew it would base the new product off ergonomics research the company worked on with Western Michigan University, said Michael Welsh, principal designer for seating at Haworth. That research, which was also used in the creation of the Zody chair, helped inform the decisions the team made regarding the seat, lumbar and back structures, he said. That basic framework helped speed the development of Very, which came to market about a year after it was first conceived.

“We had a short timeline and tough cost goals to meet,” Welsh said. “But we had a clear definition of how it needed to perform and we knew what we were after.”

While the new task chair used a similar asymmetrical lumbar support as is found on Zody, the team charted new ground with the materials used in Very, especially the fabrics, which were part of its actual architecture and needed to be tested for strength and durability.

Although the team experienced creative tension created by having the engineers at the table with the designers, the move drove the groups to work harder together, said Jason Hall, product development engineer at Haworth. As a result, the development cycle for the Very Task Chair was “much faster” than for previous products, he said.

“They’re pushing us to find more creative and unique ways to give them what they want in terms of visuals,” Hall said. “A good example of the healthy tension is the arm design. They wanted something that was very thin.”

Hall worked with Haworth’s certification testing and durability engineers to see how thin they could make the part and still have it last. The process of going from sketches to a model took only two or three days. Rather than discover a potential problem once the product was already in final stages of development, the issue was caught in the prototype stage, before all the energy had been made in final tooling, Hall said. “We found a good compromise there. There was a lot of madness, but it was a very good process.”

“Certain industries can hide things, but in chairs, the architecture is the form, so we treat everything as a visual surface,” Czumaj-Bront said.

And the form must also fit the function — comfortable sitting. That’s where Dr. Teresa Bellingar, senior corporate ergonomist at Haworth, comes in. Her research helps give the design team a basis for how the chair needs to support people and be adjustable over a range of body types.

“I look at the ergonomic standards that are out there and mesh that together with the engineering and ergonomic targets for the chair,” Bellingar said. “It provides some guidelines — like for the size and design of the controls — and gives them a starting point. When the development cycle starts, we have a bunch of proven studies so the product development teams don’t have to do that. It gets them ahead of the game.”

Of the 20 or so people in the war room, the toughest sell is always the marketing group representative, who is the “customer” for the product, Hall said. But the group that ensures the product can withstand customer use and abuse is the crew doing the certification and durability testing.

“We (see the product) from its infancy on up,” said Tod Fireout, senior testing specialist at Haworth’s in-house, independent testing facility. “We may get just the controls (at first). We know it will fail somewhere, so we see when and then they can go back to the drawing board. Then in a few weeks, we might see a more complete chair with a base and legs. With each one, we see how far they may go.”

Each product must adhere to strict BIFMA and Haworth standards before it’s ready to go out the door to customers. All of the materials and mechanisms are tested for repetitive motion under the most extreme use scenarios to find that point of failure, information the designers and engineers can then use to tweak the product to meet durability or cost requirements. The team developed tests to study the strength of particular fixtures in the Very Task Chair — the sonic welds on the fabric, for example.

“We test to failure, … so we do run into problems, but it’s all part of the process,” said Desmond Noteboom, corporate test lab supervisor at Haworth. “We had a starting point with this chair with a known controller, and some (hardware) was used before. It got high marks, so they decided to use it again.”

By focusing on the marketing group as the chair’s customer, the company ensured that the designers’ and engineers’ efforts weren’t all for naught, Welsh said.

Having the marketing people involved throughout the process saved the team from doing all the work to design and develop the chair only to find out after the fact that it is not marketable, Welsh and Czumaj-Bront said. With a good showing at NeoCon 2010, where the Very Task Chair was a silver winner for best in show, it would appear all that collaborative work paid off.

“You have no idea how intense it was,” Czumaj-Bront said.