This chair is one of the earliest furniture designs by Jasper Morrison (b.1959). He was inspired to design a chair comprised only of structural elements after he saw an antique example with its seat missing. He originally called this piece the Drinking Man's Chair, and the little metal disks at the end of the arms were intended to hold drinking glasses. He renamed it the Thinking Man's Chair. The more sophisticated name was inspired by the slogan 'The Thinking Man's Smoke' that appeared on the packet of pipe cleaners he bought to make a model of the chair.

The use of tubular steel recalls chairs of the 1920s and 1930s, and Morrison was an admirer of Modernist design of that period. With the early tubular steel furniture, functionalism dictated the structure. With this chair, the structure is more to do with free form. Nor did Modernist designers of the 1920s and 1930s paint their metal chairs in colours like this. Morrison's early prototypes included the dimensions of different steel elements painted onto the chair as a kind of decoration. The Italian firm of Cappellini made the production versions of the chair, like this one, but omitted the writing.