Don Chadwick was born in 1936 in Los Angeles and developed an interest in furniture making from his grandfather, a cabinetmaker. He studied design at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was here, unlike the other industrial design students at UCLA at the time, he focused on furniture.

And after hearing a Charles and Ray Eames lecture there, Chadwick was convinced: furniture offered designers, even industrial designers, the chance to use materials in new, innovative ways and to make a real difference in people's lives.

He founded his own practice in 1964 and his work includes Chadwick Modular Seating (1974) and the Equa 1 chair and the Aeron chair that he designed with Bill Stumpf.

Stumpf and Chadwick were awarded the Business Week Magazine and Industrial Designers Society of America Design of the Decade Award for the Aeron chair in 2000.