The Stockholm research opened the question. A workstation is a relationship between a person, a task, a screen, and the things within reach. To understand sitting, we needed to understand what happens around it.

Even the marks left on the floor could become evidence. Recording movement made an ordinary workday visible: where the chair traveled, where activity gathered, and how far the experience extended beyond a fixed sitting position.

The work moved between sketches, small models, components, and full-scale seating bucks. Each scale exposed a different question. A model could explore the overall arrangement; a rough rig could make a relationship adjustable; a person sitting in it could reveal what the drawing had missed.

Some of these objects barely resemble a chair. That was useful. We could isolate a behavior before asking it to become a finished product.

A single surface has to meet many different contours. We explored another way of thinking about support: a field of smaller elements, able to respond locally while working together.

We explored separate blocks and plates, small spring components, and linked structures. The question became more precise at each scale: how can an individual element yield, and how does its movement affect its neighbors?

In the finished chair, Pixelated Support lets the seat and back respond to small changes in the sitter’s position. Pressure is shared across many interconnected elements. What feels continuous to the body is made possible by a structure with many places to move.

The back could not be resolved as one fixed curve. It had to meet different people and remain useful as they changed position. Our experiments separated the supporting surface from the structure behind it, allowing each relationship to be explored.

Material samples, curved members, mesh, links, springs, and adjustable rigs gave that inquiry a physical vocabulary. The exposed prototypes let us look closely at what was carrying the load and what was allowing motion.

Upright and reclined are useful descriptions, but a person passes through many positions between them. The seat, back, arms, and work surface all influence that experience.

Posture sequences kept the work connected to an actual task. A keyboard and a monitor stayed in the picture while the body changed position. The mechanism had to be considered as part of that larger relationship.

A full-scale linkage model made movement visible over a drawing. A metal prototype made it physical. At the front of the seat, another set of rigs explored the contact between support and the moving body.

These were connected problems. The large movement of the chair and the small movement at its edges had to feel like one experience.

As the experiments became a chair, their relationships had to become coherent. Support surfaces, spine, links, adjustments, upholstery, and base could no longer be considered separately.

Embody’s character comes from making that structure legible. The back reveals its spine and ribs. The seat contains a layered support system. Its form lets us see something of the behavior we feel when we sit down.