When Jack Hockenberry started his classes at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music he thought he knew what he wanted to do with his career, but soon found that his interest in art and design provided a more interesting line of work.

&uot;I started out in music, and I was doing art and design, but more as a hobby. Then I realized that orchestra work for a trombone player involved standing around and doing a lot of counting,&uot; Hockenberry said.

So he enrolled at the University of Cincinnati and switched from music performance to industrial design. Now music is his hobby &045; he plays with the Albert Lea Community Band and a couple of traditional jazz groups &045; and design is his livelihood.

His most recent project has also turned out to be most rewarding. Hockenberry is the co-designer of a genuinely ergonomic chair, called a Stance &uot;angle chair,&uot; designed to alleviate posture problems for workers who spend all day sitting in a chair, working at a computer. Ergonomics is the study of how the body interacts with its environment, particularly in the workplace.

The angle chair is designed to let a worker adjust and readjust their posture to any number of positions, from the traditional sitting position to a kind of supported standing position. The chair includes a knee brace and is adjustable in three different ways. And though it may sound or look complicated, it is surprisingly easy to manipulate, according to people who use the chair now, Hockenberry said.

&uot;This chair alters your posture instead of leaving the user in a more rigid structure,&uot; he said.

The chair is the result of a lifetime of work designing furniture, including chairs, that take what Hockenberry calls the human factor into account. Part of the project’s background even flows out of his interest in music performance.

For Hockenberry, chairs are a fascinating engineering problem, from both the design and manufacturing perspectives. People sit in chairs all the time, but we learn to conform our bodies to them instead of insisting that they be designed to conform to the way our bodies are put together, he said.

Getting the design of his new chair right required many prototypes, and refining of the design based on field tests with in workplaces.

Hockenberry’s background from his studies and from the different kinds of work he has done all contributed to this project.

After graduating with a BA in Industrial Design, Hockenberry went to work for the U.S. Air Force, testing pulsating seat cushions for a cockpit seat for F-84 fighter jets that that made the seat both comfortable and efficient. In the Air Force he was introduced to the field of ergonomics and the human factor. After leaving the Air Force, he worked in systems design for IBM and was involved in product design for Steelcase and other firms. He worked as an independent consultant for awhile.

Along the way he also started work on a master’s degree at Syracuse University, where he conducted research on how design factors into consumer use of a product.

&uot;I did a lot of research on how people perceive products, as well as the biomechanical aspects of those products,&uot; said Hockenberry. But real design work continued to beckon, and he had a growing family with five children to help support, so he went back to work &045; but held on to what he learned as a graduate student.

It was when he was working on a music posture chair for Wenger Furniture in Owatonna that he started analyzing the ways that musicians use chairs, and their posture when sitting. According to him, musicians have no choice but to use good posture when they sit because they can’t perform properly unless they do. It was through examining them that he started getting a clearer picture of what a chair would have to do be support good posture.

He also spent time going over the research that was being done on how the human body reacts to the lack of gravity, as more and more astronauts were spending more time in outer space.

Then he met Alan Tholkes, who was responsible for the Easy Stand, a device that allows disabled people to pull themselves up out of a chair, and the whole angle chair project fell into place.

He sees the angle chair having a beneficial impact on many workers in the information and service economy.

&uot;An important factor to consider is that people sitting in cubicles need more control of their workspace. This chair affords them some psychological benefit, as they can take a posture break by shifting the position of their chair whenever they need to,&uot; Hockenberry said. Without the angle chair’s technology, workers are either forced to use their limited break times to walk around and squirming or shift their weight in traditional chairs, which can lead to sitting with bad posture for long periods of time and the backaches that result.

Hockenberry himself owns three of the chairs: One in his home, one in his workshop, which he also uses when he’s practicing his trombone, and one at work &045; which doubles as the model he carries around for product demonstrations.

The angle chair will probably help a lot of people avoid back problems, and it took a lot of work on the part of many people to bring to reality, but it also provided some rewards.

&uot;The chair took a lot of time to develop, but we had fun doing it,&uot; Hockenberry said.