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Creating the perfect working chair is the holy grail of furniture design. But as one new ‘sitting experience’ follows another, it seems we are still awaiting that ideal blend of form and function, says Stephen Hitchins.

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I am sitting on a Thonet bistro chair, the armchair model with a woven cane seat and back that seems to have gone out of production. I planned this article while lounging on an old Thonet bentwood rocker. I shall eat lunch sitting on an ice blue Eames DSW, and relax this evening in an LC2. In the office there is a Jacobsen leather-upholstered swivel 3217. And in the living room an early Second Empire suite that I hardly dare sit on. As Hans Wegner said back in 1983, 'I believe that everyone who is engaged in art or design dreams of creating the perfect object: The Chair. This is only a dream, a goal that will never be achieved. It becomes, on the contrary, more and more unattainable with each new attempt, with each new experience.'

Dauphin's Züco Perillo range, designed by Martin Ballendat, has won prizes for its sensuous charm.

As for the hyperbole that accompanies office chairs today, with 'a new sitting experience' about to arrive from Steelcase, can you really tell the difference in comfort levels afforded by a Gesture over a Leap? The company discovered, after studying 2,000 people in 11 countries, that, surprise surprise, people do not just sit in chairs. They curl up, lean, slouch, cocoon, strunch [sic] up, swipe, trance, and generally form themselves into nine, yes nine, ways of sitting, as they 'interact with today's technologies'. That's why you need the ultimate work chair that will cost you big bucks. For a chair maker to finally acknowledge that people do not behave as designers assume or wish they would, and that humanity has always preferred to sprawl rather than sit, should not come as any great surprise. But hey, that's marketing.

X-Code, sleek and comfortable, embodies the ergonomic principles long championed by Dauphin.

Kris Krokosz, a director at design firm Square Dot, says: 'Chairs are an incredibly personal and therefore emotional part of our lives. The decision surrounding whether one is better than another follows these emotions because the physical parameters that a chair offers become part and parcel of the preferences of our bodies. Therefore, if we are led to believe the marketing of Gesture, it should hit a wide spectrum of the workforce. However, it's always the interaction of the handles and knobs and buttons that make or break a chair, because if these don't get used then the full parameters of any chair are never met.'

Barber and Osgerby's winning design for the Bodleian Library accommodates readers' needs while complementing the venerable setting.

Bill Stumpf and Jeff Weber at Herman Miller, who won an FX International Interior Design Award in 2009, could argue they got there first with a lot less hype and for not a great deal more money. High performance, ergonomic, sympathetic to the contortions we on occasion put our body through when sitting, their Embody chair was admired for its 'indisputable comfort and health benefits'. And it was distinctive, which in a crowded market is a must. The chair goes up and down and backwards and forwards and reclines, and the arms move about, and it has given the Steelcase Leap a good run for its money, so why wait for a Gesture? The Leap is 98 per cent recyclable and 30 per cent of it is made from recycled material. But it does not look so good. And there's the rub.

Embody is sympathetic to bodily movement, comfortable, and shapely to boot.

The idea that 'we sit differently' these days because we do different things is clearly deceptive brochure talk. 'It's healthy to shift positions' is a rather desperate attempt to keep up with the way the world has always been, and the notion that merely sitting is bad for you is not new. Chairs that benefit mind and body, are supportive, adjustable, conform to the occupant's style of working, and are as earth-friendly and healthy as can be, have been around for some time. Take the chair I am sitting on right now.

It was designed by a Rhineland cabinet-maker who went to Vienna to decorate palaces and, almost in passing, invented the bentwood chair on which cafe society has sat, and largely still sits, all over the world. As Reyner Banham once famously put it, in 1970 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery: 'He made it dirt cheap; he made it by the million; he came as near as any human has to making chairs as common and unremarkable as the bums that were parked on them.'

Steelcase's Leap may not match Herman Miller's Embody for looks, but it scores on sustainability - it is 98 per cent recyclable...

Since then great chairs have been prized as pure creations of the human spirit and function be damned. The ultimate proof of the primacy of personal design came when the Knoll au Louvre exhibition in 1972 showcased one manufacturer's design icons. Back then, if you were the type of person who read Playboy for the articles, the magazine ran spreads on Bertoia and Eames, George Nelson and Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe and many more. Earlier this year in Maastricht, the NAiM/Bureau Europa, an independent organisation that focuses on architecture and design's social agenda, staged an exhibition in association with Princeton University called Playboy Architecture 1953-1979. It showed how architecture and interior design were mobilised to shape a new sexual and consumer identity for the American male, and how design taste became critical to success in the art of seduction. The exhibition set out just how far Playboy's idealised design world became a reality ingrained in America's national identity, and its subsequent global impact.

The magazine's message: if you knew about this stuff you could leverage design to bag a babe. Design's big shots were there alongside big beds and big babes that mirrored mid-century modernism. The story was laid out to show just how the magazine integrated state-of-the-art design into a carefully constructed vision of a desirable contemporary lifestyle, and hence played a crucial yet unacknowledged role in the cultivation of design culture in the USA.

Amanda Levete Architects worked with Herman Miller to develop a full-scale prototype chair for the Bodleian competition.

Some of those immortals stopped off briefly in England on their way to the States. Isokon, the firm Jack Pritchard founded in 1935, employed Walter Gropius as design director before he left for Harvard two years later, and Marcel Breuer was employed as a designer until he too left for New England. Today, Isokon has added the work of Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby to its illustrious list, producing a new chair for the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Isokon, now the responsibility of Chris McCourt and Windmill Furniture, will be hoping that it has found a classic of tomorrow to join its legacy of timeless designs from the past. As the original logotype said: 'Isokon for ease, for ever'.

Gilbert Scott's Forties' building for the Weston Library (formerly known as the New Bodleian) is undergoing a major renovation. Once the work is completed this October it will become the location for the Bodleian's special collections, rare books and western manuscripts. Contemporary interventions will include a spectacular reading room at rooftop level that will be home to the new chairs by Barber and Osgerby. Only the third seat to be developed for the Bodleian since 1756, it will join an illustrious group of historic chairs that have supported readers over the centuries. The new three-legged oak seat encapsulates a strong sense of craft heritage and sculptural form as well as addressing the complex requirements of readers. Very distinctive, certainly elegant, Barber and Osgerby's design carries a reflection of the Renaissance but is hardly reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Barrel Chair as has been suggested by some commentators. It boasts broad armrests and the bottom rail is angled to allow readers to tilt it slightly forward to enable closer manuscript inspection. 'The chair of chairs for the library of libraries' will be exhibited in the V&A in the autumn.

Compilation of exhibition images by Media & Modernity Program, School of Architecture, Princeton University

There is nothing new about a chair that tips, but it does enable one to switch from resting to an active working position that can make all the difference. Very few people design seating that is really different. Every trade fair is full of new ideas and models, new materials and new processes, pushing the boundaries of industrial constraints, but there is seldom a new type of chair. It is one of design's holy grails, often one of the first objects a designer works on, something many become obsessed by, and something that has the potential to herald fame. It may take years, at least three on average, and lots of prototypes, but if you sell 60,000 units in two years then the rewards are handsome. As Eckart Maise, head of design at Vitra, says: 'Manufacturers generally think it's a success when they reach 20,000.'

When it comes to furniture fairs and volume chair manufacture, for many years the largest stand at Orgatec has been Dauphin, one of Europe's largest of_ ce chair manufacturers with production of 2,000 chairs a day. In little over 40 years a family business has grown to be a major family-owned global player comprising 22 sales and production companies servicing a family of brands. While one could buy a Lusso Luxe model for 3,430 euros, most of its chairs fall in a range from 450 to 1,000 euros. Key to its success has been its early adoption (in the Seventies) of ergonomics as the driving force behind all its thinking, together with the consistent strength of a significant in-house design team and the relationships it has continued to build with external designers, resulting in a raft of design awards over the years from NeoCon in the Nineties to regular appearances on the winning rosters of Orgatec, IIDEX, BCFA, Red Dot, iF Hanover, and the Designpreis der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in most years since. The sensuously sculpted chameleon of a chair, the Züco Perillo range designed by Martin Ballendat, has won plenty, and the X-Code designed by Daniel Figueroa with the in-house team was nominated for the 2014 German Design Council's Design Award as soon as it hit the market.

Quite a number of the best interior designers studied furniture design at college. It must be something about a feel for materials and proportion and form that gives them such a feeling for space and what is required to accommodate activity and work processes. Kris Krokosz again: 'I always remember a huge debate that took place at my college. The faculty of 3D Design (incorporating furniture and interiors) organised a special day where external consultants discussed their postgraduate experiences. Safe to say that, and, as a matter of fact vetoed by all interior students, the overall opinion seemed to be that furniture designers had a stronger ability to not only see the wider world or take a more global view of a brief, but by their very training could look at the detail aspects that make up the whole.

Later in life I came across Myers Briggs, the personality profile inventory that suggests individual psychological types, which in my opinion would put furniture designers right in the middle of the spectrum covering the second of the four principal indicators - information. Among other things, this assesses whether you are more sensing or intuitive, ie, do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? Or, in an even simpler world, do you look at the wider picture or just focus on the detail? The interior designers generally ended up at the global end of the spectrum and the furniture designers ended up at the detail end. However, the furniture designers who could master an interior world as well as their own tended to end up right in the middle of the spectrum, suggesting that the debate some 15 years earlier in college came up with the right conclusion.'

I sat on an Aeron for five years. Designed by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, the Aeron was as green as they came, and then some, back in 1992, and almost as recyclable as the Leap. Not only was it environmentally benign, it was ergonomically, functionally, and anthropometrically accommodating to the most demanding of backsides. It redefined the meaning of 'work chair' as nothing else has done for some time. It did not look like anything else and it did not work like much else besides. Biomorphic, curvilinear, transparent, cushion free, the concoction of polymers and die-cast aluminium took its place in the Museum of Modern Art collection in 1994.

When the banking sector crashed, acres of the things could be seen across empty trading floors and piled up by exit signs. The best engineering that money could buy, its eccentric looks a direct expression of meticulous problem-solving and engineering, Herman Miller initially baulked at the chair as too futuristic. Yet it became a classic because of all the stories that surrounded it, its quirky looks a selling point, symbolising design's changing conventions and the move to more sustainable products. For a decade it went unchallenged - the apotheosis of the office chair. Twenty years before the Gesture arrived, the Aeron's designers knew all about sedentary desk-bound lifestyles, but their chair was so comfortable it positively encouraged you to stay seated.

I think I might go and sit down at the table and spread out my papers. That means a GF 40/4, the upholstered variety with the extra padding and a gold medal winner at the Milan Triennale back in 1964. Nice chairs.