In This World of Wonders by Nicholas Wolterstorff

Author:Nicholas Wolterstorff [Wolterstorff, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Philosophers, Religious, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780802876799
Google: T8pAuQEACAAJ
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Published: 2019-01-15T04:22:12+00:00

In the early 1970s, I received a phone call from someone who identified himself as the personnel manager of the Herman Miller Corporation and asked whether I would be willing to come to the company’s headquarters in Zeeland, Michigan, about twenty miles west of Grand Rapids, to spend a day as a consultant. My immediate response was that he had the wrong number; I was a philosopher. No, he said, I was the person they wanted. They wanted a philosopher who was interested in the arts. After further discussion, I accepted the invitation, partly because I was intrigued, partly because the honorarium they offered was well in excess of any honorarium I had ever received!

Herman Miller produces meticulously crafted furniture for both the domestic and commercial markets. For more than seventy-five years it has been a leader in good industrial design. Several of its chairs have become icons of modern design, most famously the Eames Lounge Chair, designed by Charles Eames and first produced in 1956, and the Aeron Chair, designed by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick and first produced in 1994. Claire and I had for years admired Herman Miller furniture, and we owned a few items ourselves.

There were five of us consultants from around the country: a journalist, a lawyer, a physician employed by NASA, a freelance furniture designer (Bill Stumpf), and I; five or six of the top executives at Herman Miller were also present, along with Max De Pree, the CEO of the company. Max led off the discussion by remarking that twice a year he and his top executives took a day off from their regular work to stand back and reflect, with a small group of consultants, on what they were doing at Herman Miller. It was their experience, he said, that a reflective retreat of this kind helped them keep the big picture in mind.

Max had written down a few questions for our discussion. He didn’t care in what order we discussed them, nor whether we got around to all of them; they were simply questions he had on his mind. We, the consultants, were not to concern ourselves with how our discussion might benefit the company; we were to let the conversation flow. The people from the company would discuss later what to do with what was said.

I remember three of Max’s questions. First, is there a moral imperative to good design? Max explained that, ever since the mid-1930s, the Herman Miller Company had been committed to good modern design, and he told the story of how that commitment came about. At that time the company, then headed by Max’s father, D. J. De Pree, was making conventional furniture. One day the designer Gilbert Rohde came through showing his portfolio of modernist furniture design. D. J. was intrigued and, so the story goes, remarked to Rohde, “Well, we’re not making any money now, so we may as well try your designs.” Over the years since then, there had proved to be a significant market for Herman Miller’s modernist furniture.

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