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A sedentary lifestyle is a common issue for office employees. This lifestyle can lead to multiple health problems, such as back pain, obesity, and cancer. Multiple options to improve this issue exist including standing desks, ball chairs, and digital reminders to mitigate sedentary behaviors. However, people often ignore options made available and remain sedentary at work. This study evaluates the potential for a new office workstation design that could motivate people to be more active and improve their habits in the work environment. The design was generated based on the affordance analysis method, which is intended to support a person’s daily activities within the constraints of his or her office environment. Preliminary testing suggests that workstation design is more appealing to users when compared to other existing solutions for decreasing sedentary behaviors in the office, and affordance theory can be an effective tool to decrease sedentary behavior in an office environment through thoughtful design based on user needs.

Background: As offices change and employees spend more of their lives at work, managers and designers need to understand the relationship between employees and their work environment to spend investment dollars wisely. This study investigated the efficacy of various physical workstation environment characteristics in a medical office building (MOB) using observation and employee survey responses. Method: This was a cross-sectional exploratory study measuring both the observed physical work environment and employees’ perceptions of their workstation satisfaction, comfort, and performance in a MOB. Results: Findings suggest that employees seek to improve comfort ratings for acoustics, privacy levels, and access to daylight and nature views. No moderating nor main effects were seen for satisfaction or performance, but comfort ratings did show main three main effects. Discussion: The study highlighted opportunities to enhance employee comfort, performance and satisfaction using the physical environment. These findings inform and identify future research opportunities for MOB design.

People can be creative anywhere but how can designers and organizations encourage this process to occur at an office workstation through the physical work environment? This four stage study investigated what Interior Designers, experts in a field that judges creativity, felt they needed to enhance their creativity while occupying a workstation in a commercial or home office. An exploratory mixed method of social science qualitative and quantitative research was employed that applied methodological triangulation validating the data through cross verification of codes produced through the narrative process that were perceived to influence the creative phenomena in office workers. In stage one, 12 Interior Designers were asked to produce drawings of their workstations and write a narrative on how their workstations encouraged their creativity. This data was used to develop a survey that was completed by 213 Interior Designers across North America. One hundred and twenty-nine of these participants also completed the optional narrative at the end of the survey discussing how their workstations contributed to their creativity. A list of the top thirty-five items from the physical office environment, that the participants perceived to encourage their creativity, was produced. Twelve themes were also developed through the extraction of codes from the survey narratives and ranked in order of importance. The uniqueness of each participant was evident and many voices were heard through the narrative process used in this research project. This study has set the ground work for the development of an instrument of measure that can accurately determine the physical needs of an individual to maximize their creativity and allow for their successful integration into an organization’s physical office environment. This research adds to the evidence based design portfolio available to designers and organizational managers who are responsible for making design decisions that affect office workers at their workstations in the built environment; workers who produce creative ideas that can transform into innovative products and contribute to the health of an organization. Advisor: Betsy Gabb