Steelcase recently sent me a demo unit of their new Think chair, and I'm in heaven. I'd owned the Think's ancestor, the wonderful Leap chair, before — I had six of them when I lived in San Francisco, and I'd kept two in storage when I went away. I trucked these down to LA with me when I moved back, because I couldn't bear to part with them. The Leaps were the best sitting machines I'd ever tried, incredibly suspension for your entire body. Sitting in a Leap automatically put me into good posture, and even over long periods — even with a bad back — the Leap was comfortable.
The Think is the successor to the Leap and it's magnificent. The only thing I didn't like about the Leap was its aesthetic. It was big and heavy — solid as anything, but also a pain to move from room to room and not the prettiest piece of furniture I'd ever owned.
The Think is like the Leap, but slimmed down and refined. It looks great, like a cross between the ethereal mesh of the cliche Herman Miller Aeron chair and the solidity of the older Steelcase designs. The Think has even fewer controls than the Leap (which had fewer still than the Aeron) — instead, it is built from isometrically opposed materials that bend, give, and then hold to support you as you move, keeping you upright and balanced no matter how you squirm or fuss. That's key — I hate being in a chair that makes me sit in exactly the same pose for protracted periods. No matter how good the chair is, it's not good enough that you want to be immobilized in it.
I'm intrigued by Steelcase's information on the production of the chair and the way that it is intended to be gracefully decomposed into recyclable elements at the end of its life. It can be disassembled with ordinary hand tools in five minutes (I put it together with an Allen key in about a minute), and 99 percent of the components are recyclable (and many are made from recycled materials to begin with).
Now that I've got it set up at my desk, I don't think I can part with it — I suspect that when I move back overseas, a Think chair will accompany me.
