Work-related musculoskeletal disorders have become one of the most common chronic diseases of modern society. In this paper, we address the problem of physical inactivity in the context of office work and we introduce a new concept of working “in-motion” with high potential to reduce prolonged sedentary behavior and related degenerative phenomena. We promote a paradigm shift in workplace design towards an integrated supportive environment that provides opportunities for office workers to seamlessly change between different work environments. Within the Active Office project, we are addressing associated opportunities and challenges for HCI design arising in this context, to encourage people for the adoption of a physically active work process in a more natural way.
Motivation
For our ancestors, movement was a question of survival: only those who could move far and fast were able to hunt, defend themselves, or collect enough seeds and fruits to survive. Running, jumping, bending, stretching, stooping, or crouching: from an evolutionary perspective, this is what the human body is originally made for. Today, however, these natural behavior patterns have largely been replaced by sedentary behaviors. Over the past centuries, there has been a large shift in the types of activities we do every day and our lives have become inactive for the most part. The consequence is that our complex musculoskeletal system remains unchallenged and many of our highly specialized body functions become stunted because they remain unused. As a result, modern society has to deal with classic diseases of civilization – first of all musculoskeletal disorders, heart disease, and obesity.
In contrast, a physically active work process has high potential for the avoidance of prolonged sedentary behavior and related degenerative phenomena. In this paper, we introduce the Active Office, an activity-promoting workspace environment that supports the integration of light activities into the predominately sedentary office workflow.
Active Office Workplace Design
To promote physical activity at the workplace, we suggest a paradigm shift in workplace design towards an integrated activity-promoting environment that supports the adoption of a physically active office workflow:
Ergonomic Workplace Design
Our design concept involves an ergonomically designed workspace that integrates traditional office furniture with elements such as active seats, height-adjustable standing desks, and whiteboards to form an interconnected workplace environment.
Workplace Media Support
Furthermore, office furniture is smoothly integrated with hardware-related structural elements such as desktop computers, notebooks, tablets, or large-scale interactive surfaces that extend the design with media support.
Task-centered Distribution of Work
Based that, the goal of the Active Office is then, to motivate users to draw full benefit from the provided structure. Consequently, we encourage the adoption a new way of working “in-motion” characterized by regular switches between different tasks, workstations, and postures.
Publications
K. Probst, J. Leitner, F. Perteneder, M. Haller, A. Schrempf, and J. Glöckl, 2012.
“Active Office: Towards an Activity-Promoting Office Workplace Design“, in CHI EA ’12: Proceedings of the 30th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2012. to be published.
Authors
Kathrin Probst, Jakob Leitner, Florian Perteneder, Michael Haller
Media Interaction Lab
mi-lab@fh-hagenberg.at
Andreas Schrempf
Medical Technology, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
Josef Glöckl
aeris – Impulsmöbel GmbH & Co. KG
