Niels Diffrient, the American honoured by the Royal Society of Arts

In 1987 the Royal Society of Arts in London appointed Niels Diffrient an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry — a distinction the RSA reserves for a handful of practitioners outside Britain. By then the Mississippi-born designer had spent twenty-five years at Henry Dreyfuss Associates, shaped aircraft cabins for American Airlines, co-authored the three-volume Humanscale reference on human factors, and collected honours on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Chrysler Design Award to the Smithsonian's National Design Award in 2002.

His later work is what offices know him for: the Freedom and Liberty task chairs he created for Humanscale, both available through La Mercanti alongside the Diffrient World, for workplaces that take sitting as seriously as he did.