The design of the 360 chair questions our expectations of office task chairs. Normally these chairs are of a very high specification with an upholstered adjustable seat, backrest and armrests that respond to the sitter’s size and weight. With its low backrest and narrow seat in self-bearing polyurethane, the 360 offers none of these comforts and encourages the sitter to be active and agile. ‘It is not intended for long stints of work in a static position. Instead it encourages a form of dynamic sitting, short term, ad hoc, improvised,’ says Grcic of the design. When the chair was released in 2009, the architect and critic Sam Jacob commented that ‘Konstantin Grcic´s radical take on the office chair shatters the ergonomists’ monopoly on workplace design’ (Icon 75).

The German designer Konstantin Grcic (b.1965) established his studio in Munich in 1991, after he trained as a cabinet maker at The John Makepeace School for Craftsmen in Wood at Parnham College in Dorset and studied Design at the Royal College of Art in London. He started out primarily as a designer for furniture and product, but has moved into exhibition and interior design as well as design for clothing.

Magis is an Italian furniture company that was founded in 1976 by Eugenio Perazza. It is still a family-run business in which Perazza works very closely with freelance designers to push manufacturing methods and furniture typologies in new directions. Magis has no internal production capabilities; instead, everything is sourced from specialist suppliers, most of which are based in north-east Italy. This approach allows Magis to experiment with a huge breadth of production techniques and materials.