Founded in 1982, Humanscale is recognized as the leading manufacturer of ergonomic products for the office. Our diverse product range helps ensure that individuals who spend hours each day in front of a computer, do so in maximum comfort and with minimal long-term health risks. To achieve this result, our philosophy regarding product design is this: Technology can make simple things complicated or complicated things simple. We believe in the latter approach and strive to design products that combine uncompromising function and honest aesthetics with ultimate ease-of-use.
Knowing that a truly ergonomic chair could make more of a difference to user health than most any other product, Humanscale entered the task seating market in 1999 with the Freedom chair, which has won 10 design awards to-date - including the Design Distinction Award in the prestigious ID Design Review 2000 competition. The Freedom chair has revolutionized the task chair industry and has set new standards for task chair performance and functionality. Because of its honest design aesthetic, Freedom has also been seen in dozens of feature films and is a regular in prime-time, being featured on hit television shows such as 24, CSI Miami and Boston Legal.
In 2004, Humanscale launched its extremely popular Liberty chair line. With its patent-pending Form-Sensing Mesh Technology, the Liberty chair takes the benefits of mesh seating – breathability, durability, sustainability and aesthetic appeal – to the next level, providing exceptional comfort and automatically customized lumbar support without an external lumbar device. To date, Liberty and the new Liberty Side Chair have won over 12 design awards, including Best of NeoCon Gold and ID Design Distinction Awards for each.
Next to the chair, an articulating keyboard support is the most important component of an ergonomic workstation. Humanscale entered the articulating keyboard support market in 1997 with the Freedom Arm, which won a Best of NeoCon Award that year for its revolutionary functionality. By 1998, it had become the worldwide leader in keyboard support sales. Our next keyboard support, the 2G, won Gold in 1999 at both NeoCon and IIDEX and picked up where the Freedom Arm left off - by quickly becoming the market leader. Today, with our fifth-generation mechanism (the 5G) added to our stable of keyboard mechanisms, Humanscale remains the worldwide market leader in articulating keyboard supports.
The quality of our products is directly related to the ingenuity of the designers who create them. We are extremely fortunate to work with distinguished industrial designers, such as Niels Diffrient, who have literally revolutionized a number of ergonomic product categories. Niels' contributions to ergonomic seating, such as the pneumatic cylinder and knee-tilt mechanism, have been standards on task chairs for the past twenty years and, together with his Freedom chair, are among the reasons he won the 2002 National Design Award, handed out by the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Likewise, George Mileos' Freedom Arm, which was the first keyboard support to offer knob-free adjustability and total knee clearance, completely changed the way articulating keyboard support mechanisms were designed.
Most recently, Humanscale’s international design team has continued Humanscale’s history of innovation by designing an impressive range of award-winning products including the Switch Mouse, Cinto stacking chair, CPU600, T5 Point-of-Care Technology Cart, and many others. Housed in the heart of Manhattan, the Design Studio features a team-oriented workstation design that encourages idea-sharing and open communication. It also boasts a state-of-the-art machine shop and prototyping lab that facilitates the speed and efficiency by which concepts can be realized into three-dimensional and functional prototypes. The Design Studio works very closely with Humanscale’s in-house ergonomists to ensure that all designs are based on the latest human factors research and knowledge.
Humanscale has always been committed to environmental sustainability and continually strives to design, engineer and manufacture products that consume less of the Earth’s limited resources. This is accomplished by creating products that weigh less (i.e. require less material), have fewer parts (which requires fewer manufacturing processes) and contain a high percentage of recycled and recyclable content. Additionally, wherever possible, Humanscale utilizes aluminum as its material of choice. Our aluminum is 100% recycled and recyclable which never degrades, enabling it to be reused over and over again. Using aluminum usually costs us more than plastics, but our products are better for it. And so is the environment.