One of the century's preeminent American designers, Niels Diffrient has endeavored throughout his career to emphasize the "human factors" of industrial design, using ingenuity and intuition to bring consumers the products that meet their needs. From his 25 years at the office of Henry Dreyfuss, where his signature output covered everything from thermostats to high voltage towers to an office system for KI-awarded Best of Competition at NeoCon 1998-Diffrient has operated under the assumption that designers needed to work from "the inside out." The design process proceeds hand in hand with the engineering process and not as a subsequent frill to adorn an otherwise anodyne product.

Diffrient's emphasis on meeting human needs was codified in the three-volume Humanscale, an influential sourcebook for designers that examined the movements and dimensions of the human body.

From his early work with Eero Saarinen and Marco Zanuzo to the present, Diffrient's integrity and vision have been recognized in dozens of awards and honorary citations. He has also served as designer or consultant to the Fortune 500's leading companies. His quest to create workplace environments that meet the needs of their users is marked by "Freedom," a task chair that conforms to its user's shape without an array of knobs and levers. It is also seen in KI's Flexible WorkSpace, which resolves the problem of bringing power and data functions to mobile, organically driven workstation layouts.