By Danine Alati

As the office landscape evolves to include more collaborative spaces, the need for stacking seating increases. By their nature, these slim, lightweight, mobile chairs fare well in such flex settings—as well as in cafés/cafeteria, auditoriums, breakout spaces, and training rooms—as they may be stacked or nested and quickly moved out of the way or set up as needed. But now the criteria of stackers go beyond just how many can be stored on a cart and stowed away. Traditional stacking chairs are not always necessarily stacked. Instead, they often remain in place or roll around to various collaborative work settings. So no longer is it a strictly utilitarian product, and how high they stack might not rank as the top concern. Stackers now must meld technology, design, and comfort into one slender, well-priced package that won't leave much of an environmental footprint.

Big-name manufacturers are able to provide options at several price points. However, affordable stackers often lack design aesthetic, while the iconic chairs could break the budget, since companies tend to buy stacking chairs in bulk. Turnstone's Domino chair offers a viable solution with a good design at the low $101 price point. Interestingly enough, even as industrial designers adapt with the changing times and evolve their creations, Steelcase's Max Stacker (circa 1970) remains a best-selling stacker, as customers continue to add to their stacking chair collections by replacing older chairs with the same tried and trusted product.

The current rage is incorporating high-tech mechanisms that intuitively adjust to sitters' needs—which is logical for a task chair but slightly trickier for scaled down stacking chairs. KI's Strive chair has an articulating back, Herman Miller's Caper is available with FLEXNET—a strong, breathable suspension material for enhanced ergonomics and even weight distribution—and Steelcase has incorporated its patented liveseat flexors into its Move chair, for example. Since people tend to be using stacking chairs for more extended periods, it makes sense that the comfort enhancing mechanisms that were once exclusive to task chairs have been adapted to the stacking variety, such as KnollStudio's versatile Gigi stacker, which has an optional tablet arm to accommodate a laptop.

But specifiers are not necessarily looking for lots of frills—essentially, these still must just be functional, good looking seats. The Design for Environment (DfE) program is playing an increasingly more critical role in the development of product, as manufacturers, engineers, and industrial designers are realizing the ramifications of not designing green. Most manufacturers in all product categories seek to improve environmentally friendly offerings by creating products that use fewer materials, and are made from renewable resources that do not off-gas, and can be recycled; and stacking chairs are no exception.

As far as enhanced aesthetics, there will be a push for sleeker styles that combine steel and plastic components. And a rather unexpected new trend will be the lightweight stacking chair that is sturdy enough for bariatric applications. In response to this need, Keilhauer has introduced Ripple, which can support a user's weight up to 500 lbs. And Allsteel's durable, 100-percent recyclable Nimble chair weighs only about 15 lbs. itself but can accommodate up to 300 lbs.

While, indeed, it is impressive when a chair can stack 20 tall to stow away and save precious floor space, the next generation of this multipurpose seat will also offer so much more and perform so well that it could even stack up against that tired task chair.   

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