CNN anchors, TV stars, corporate presidents and millions of ordinary office workers sit in the ubiquitous high-backed black mesh chair called the Aeron. Few know it was designed by Minnesota industrial designer Bill Stumpf.
Stumpf, who lived and worked in Stockholm, Wis., in recent years, died Wednesday of complications from abdominal surgery. He was 70.
"He had all kinds of ideas about the way things work, not just how they look," said Mickey Friedman, a former design curator at the Walker Art Center. She featured Stumpf's work in a playful 1984 exhibit called "A Serious Chair" and published a famously fun issue of Design Quarterly he wrote about Julia Child's kitchen.
To research that project, Stumpf moved in with Child and her husband, Paul, to watch them cook for several days, "so he could really understand what they did," said Clark Malcolm, a friend and longtime colleague at the Herman Miller Co.
"He had enormous notebooks full of sketches, quotes and data gathered from anthropologists, biostatisticians, back surgeons and human-factors experts," he recalled. "All of that went into that big hopper of his brain and out came designs."
Born in St. Louis in 1936 and educated at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and at the University of Wisconsin, Stumpf "loved the Midwest, its humanity and its humility," Malcolm said.
On the other hand, things that were ugly or didn't work made him mad.
"He once got out of an Amtrak train and washed the windows," Malcolm said. "He just couldn't help it."
