Body Conscious Design Soul Seat Review, by Galen Cranz

For decades, Galen Cranz, writer of the definitive history of The Chair and creator of the Body Conscious Design standard, has challenged designers to make a chair that doesn’t hurt our bodies.

We are thrilled to share that the Soul Seat has earned her seal of approval as a Body Conscious Design. Below is her full review of the Soul Seat:

In a culture of sedentary workers that will not—and now often physically cannot—get down to the floor, Ikaria, the designer of the Soul Seat, has brought the floor up to us. The Soul Seat is little short of a revolution in desk sitting. It pushes us forward ideologically by looking to the past and reintegrating what has never stopped working.

Humans have been sitting on the ground for millenia. The practice of floor sitting has remained unbroken, including in the traditions of yoga and zen meditation. Our bodies make this possible for us, and give us many postural options while we’re down there. Babies begin their lives with the innate ability to sit easily on the ground. The “sitting-rising” exercise, which challenges folks to sit on the floor and get back up again without leaning on the hands or the knees, was developed by a team led by Claudio Gil Araújo as a predictor of longevity. When standard right angle chairs start to replace our myriad floor-sitting postures over a long period of time, we lose flexibility in all of our lower body joints—mainly: our hip flexors become short and tight. If we don’t maintain a practice of sitting on the floor to counter chair-sitting, it’s not uncommon to lose the ability to sit on the floor altogether. As they say: use it or lose it. In the modernized developed world, sitting on the floor and squatting are often stigmatized as being lowly and dirty, which reinforces the dominance of right angle chairs. As a result, chairs are introduced into children’s lives, in the form of strollers and car seats, even before they can support the weight of their own heads and bodies. Then come the high chairs, then come the school desks, then come the office desks, and then comes the “chair yoga” for the reduced mobility suffered from not sitting on the floor enough. 

The Soul Seat is a boon for anyone (like my assistant Chelsea Rushton, who introduced me to it) that has—and seeks to maintain!—an established floor-sitting practice but is bound by a standard desk or table, or a conservative working environment. The Soul Seat is also a very helpful tool for people who are looking to build up mobility toward a floor-sitting practice. There are as many ways to sit in the Soul Seat as there are to sit on the floor: cross-legged, kneeling, diamond legs, squatting, combinations, and more. Additionally, users have the option to sit on the seat with one or both feet on the floor, either at standard chair height, or better yet at perch height, where the angle between torso and thighs is approximately 120 degrees, rather than 90 degrees. In either case, the auto-adjust perch is an excellent design feature. It gives added and adjustable height to the sits bones (thus eliminating the 90 degree sitting effect on the hip flexors) and makes sitting in any of the positions possible on the Soul Seat more anatomically easeful—keeping the pelvis above the knees in any seated position helps to maintain the natural curvature of the lumbar vertebrae, and as a result the stability of the whole spine. I especially appreciate the tilted perch kit, which adjusts the perch to angle forward and further enables the natural curves of the spine, and encourages the development of the deep core strength necessary to keep us upright. Culturally, and ideologically, the Soul Seat bridges past and present, and brings a unique opportunity for contemporary workplaces to embrace a way of sitting that can support our bodies better than right angle sitting in standard office chairs ever could. 

Our Soul Seat has been largely monopolized thus far by Chelsea, who at the time that I met her, was completing her Master’s thesis at a coffee table that she turned into a desk so she could work, literally, on the floor. Chelsea has used the Soul Seat with much satisfaction for video meetings, computing, handwriting, and dining. We have both noted from her experience that when users pair their Soul Seat with a laptop, it’s important to position the laptop screen in a way that supports the alignment of the head and neck. This means raising the laptop up from a standard height work surface—we use a slanted desktop reading stand—and may also mean using an auxiliary keyboard and mouse to maintain proper alignment of the arms, wrists, and hands. The Soul Seat allows for regular, unobtrusive, shifts in position of the legs. The swivel and rolling features of the original model—with the metal base and casters—also allows for fluid twists of the spine and greater reach, as well as propelled movement around a workspace while seated. We have primarily used our Soul Seat at a table that is approximately two inches higher than standard height, and not adjustable, but we can both see the benefits of pairing it with an adjustable height work surface—particularly the benefit of using the Soul Seat as a perch.

The Soul Seat’s build quality is excellent: it was relatively straightforward to put together out of the box, although we felt that the auto-adjust perch and tilted perch kit cards could show clearer figures and more detailed instructions and images to facilitate setup. Once built, the seat feels very stable and secure. We did not receive all the parts of the perch tilt kit, and our contacts at Ikaria were responsive about this and sent us a replacement kit so we could try this feature, which is especially helpful to me. The soft, curved butterfly shape of the seat, which echoes the shape of the buttocks and legs in a cross-legged position, is sophisticated and unique—a real conversation starter at a dinner party! I have asked visitors to sit on the Soul Seat and seen that they don’t need special instruction; its use is intuitive. Further, they are surprised how good it feels on their back to be able to sit up straight. The perch position makes uprightness much easier than classical right angle sitting! The wool upholstery on our model is cozy and is not slippery, as a leather cover might be (with the perch tilt kit, leather upholstery could cause the sits bones to slide off the perch, but the trade-off is that leather is easier to clean). As mentioned, we both appreciate the casters that allow the chair to roll, and we’d love to see an option to add casters onto the model with the bamboo base, which is more to our taste than the shiny chrome. That said, we appreciate that the metal base houses the hardware that adjusts the seat height, which gives the metal base cleaner lines than the current bamboo model. The design of the metal base, with the starfish-style legs, offers a Body Conscious Design opportunity for massaging the feet on the ends of the legs; however, the way these legs terminate is sharp and not comfortable for the soles of the feet when bare. Chairs such as the HÅG Capisco (designed by Peter Opsvik) and the Salli Saddle (designed by Vessi Jalkanen) both feature legs with curved ends and either raised ridges or dots for the purpose of foot massage. We would love to see Ikaria incorporate something similar into the Soul Seat design. 

Is there such a thing as a truly body friendly chair? The Soul Seat, offering more postural flexibility than any other chair we know currently on the market, comes close. Body Conscious Design takes to heart a quip by designer Peter Opsvik: The best posture is the next posture. This means that no matter how great the chair itself is, the amount of time a sitter spends on it will ultimately determine how body friendly it is. And, you probably guessed it—the less the better. One of the primary aims of Body Conscious Design is to wean people off standard chairs, but this can’t only happen at the individual level; it must also happen at the cultural level. Chair sitting is a status-quo issue in large part because it is such a well established status issue. Most of the well-known “radical” designer chairs to hit the scene in the last three centuries have not even questioned the right angle paradigm. In order to change the status quo, we have to change (improve) the status of alternative modes of sitting. This requires not just design changes, but also education on a mass scale: about what these changes are, why they are important for us, and how to incorporate them into our everyday lives. A key aspect of this education is that it needs to focus on the benefits of the changes, not just the drawbacks of staying the same. In concert with this, incentives to change would facilitate this process immensely (think robust government and private sector funding for discounted, complementary, or even mandated equipment; equipment recycling programs; infrastructure for industry-wide changes; as well as paid educational training—starting in early childhood education, and onward into adult work life. Consistently applied and supported design and education aligned with the principles of Body Conscious Design will, together and over time, perhaps generations, create a collective shift in values toward—or back to—the designs our bodies need. With the Soul Seat, we have a new and improved design. Now it’s time to educate, and spread the word.