Dare To Be Different!

The Herman Miller Aeron Chair

Have you noticed that every person is uniquely different? We have twin sons born nine minutes apart. They grew up in the same home, in the same environment, with the same brothers and parents. Yet they are unique individuals with different interests, personalities and preferences. And don’t you ever forget it!

If we are so different from one another, why do we try so hard to conform and “fit in?” Why are we so afraid of being different? Why do we look to our exterior world to give us identity and significance? Why are we so concerned with what other people think of us?

Perhaps it’s because we haven’t adequately understood our unique, God-given design. We aren’t comfortable with whom God created us to be in Christ, so we seek out the approval of others. Let’s just stop this nonsense and dare to be different!

Michael Vance, referred to as the Dean of Creativity, has said this: “The more you are like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.” God has uniquely fashioned each person for a special purpose.

In the early 90’s the designers at Herman Miller Inc. began to create a new type of office chair. It was designed to fit and interact with the human body in a way that no chair had previously done. Because the human form has no straight lines, it is biomorphic; the new chair was designed to be curvilinear. It was designed to be the most ergonomically correct chair imaginable. There is not one straight line in the Aeron chair.

And how was this new design received? People hated it! Focus groups complained that it was ugly and experts despised it. The Aeron broke the accepted conventions of what a chair should look like. The chair was so new and different that people couldn’t accept its superior design.

Herman Miller persevered and took the Aeron to market in spite of criticism, believing in their unique chair design. Today the Aeron is Herman Millers best selling chair ever. In 1999 the Industrial Designers Society of America named the Aeron chair as one of 36 “Designs of the Decade,” and the only Gold award winner in the furniture category. Others have hailed the Aeron among the best-designed consumer products of the past 100 years. The Aeron chair looks like itself and its unique form expresses its purpose and use. The Aeron is a chair that dared to be different.

How about you? In what areas of your life is God calling you out? Are you seeking to fulfill your God-given design, or do you look to the approval and acceptance of others? Are you willing to stand alone; to go against the flow? Are you willing to create culture; to be a unique, one-of-a-kind design? By God’s grace, let’s dare to be different!

For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10