Some clues come from the remarkable career of Robert Propst. Propst was a sculptor, painter, art teacher, and inventor of devices as varied as a vertical timber harvester and a machine-readable livestock tag. A trained chemical engineer, he’d spent the Second World War managing beachhead logistics in the South Pacific. In 1958, he was hired by the Herman Miller company, a manufacturer of office furniture. Herman Miller’s managers thought Propst was a genius.28