The Ekstrem chair was designed already in the 1970’s by a then young and promising designer from Oslo called Terje Ekstrøm. He had a prototype ready in 1972 but it took over 10 years before any furniture producer was willing to produce it. Before the 1980’s furniture produced in Norway had to be both functional, easy to produce and useful. In the eighties, with greater economic power came a fresh breath into the furniture industry! The Ekstrem is in many ways a symbol of this.
The Ekstrem was conceptualised at a time that ergonomics and physiology had begun to provide young designers with a theoretical basis that let them experiment with sitting positions that were very different from the sitting positions that typical, bourgeois Scandinavian chairs of the forties and fifties allowed. Terje Ekstrøm wanted to design a chair that supported the use of different, varying sitting positions. He wanted a chair that opposed the traditional form of a chair. From this, the Ekstrem was born.
via https://www.varierfurniture.com/en_us/news/chairs/the-ekstrem-an-80-s-icon
