Herman Miller was founded in 1905 in Zeeland, Michigan, USA as a small furniture manufacturer of traditional bedroom furniture. During the 1920s and 1930s Herman Miller began producing modern furniture design under the leadership of Dirk Jan De Pree and designer Gilbert Rohde.

In the mid-twentieth century, Herman Miller developed its research arm, Herman Miller Research Corporation (HMRC) and collaborated with American designers such as George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames. Since then, the business has been known for producing research and designs for innovative approaches to furniture manufacture. In 1964, under the direction of inventor Robert Propst, the company introduced the Action Office, a modular system that introduced the office cubicle into many working environments. Subsequently, a lot of the company’s innovation has been focused on the office environment and it has had a significant financial success in this market with products such as the Aeron Chair, designed in 1992 by industrial designers, Donald T. Chadwick and William Stumpf. In 2017 Herman Miller incorporated the Aeron chair in its new project OS Live and the in-house design team worked on the additional designs to enable the chair to be networked to a cloud server. After four years of development Herman Miller launched the ‘Live OS’ range in 2017 which read user posture and habits.

This version of the Aeron chair remained a prototype and never launched to market, perhaps reflecting some of the unease around monitoring the movement of individuals.