Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
At a basic level, architecture is like a shoe: a useful tool designed to protect the human body from harm caused by the natural elements.
Yet over time, we can become over-reliant on its comfort, losing our dexterity and our ability to withstand even the slightest discomforts. So what is meant to help us may, in fact, hinder us by making things too easy, removing all physical challenges and other stressors that are essential for optimal health.
You’re reading this at your desk. You are slumped, as usual, over your keyboard. Your hand rests heavily on your mouse. Occasionally you twitch it to open a new tab or email.
The only other movement you make is the flickering of your eyes from webpage to webpage. And now, you learn, clicking on a headline and casting your eye down the article, that office workers - people like you - must exercise for an hour a day to counter the death risk of modern working lifestyles.
What I call physical activity is limited to stowing my luggage into the overhead bin. I could include making the steep descent to the mailbox at the foot of our hill or climbing the stairs to my second-floor office. Rarely was my doctor amused during my annual checkups when these were my answers about regular exercise. A checkup two years ago was different. He wondered what I had been doing to reverse the annual weight gain, cholesterol increase, blood pressure rise. He remained in wonderment when I told him that, for three, months, I had been standing up during part of my workday.
Over the past few years we’ve heard all sorts of dire warnings about the effects of sitting. “Your Desk Job Makes You Fat, Sick, and Dead” is just one of the alarming headlines that have accompanied the news.
A report out Wednesday in the journal Lancet provides a somewhat predictable solution. It says the key to canceling out the dangers of sitting is to be active. What’s more helpful is the study’s formula that calculates just how much physical activity is needed to ward off the risks of sitting: it’s a ratio of one to eight. You must be active for one hour to make up for every eight hours staying put, which for most people equates to about 60 or 75 minutes per day. The activity doesn’t have to be rigorous—even brisk walking would suffice—and it can be completed in shorter increments.
There is a lurid headline in today’s Telegraph proclaiming that ‘Working in an office is as bad as smoking’. It’s been picked up by a number of other news outlets, has been splashed all over search engines and will no doubt join the stream of misleading narrative that distorts the subject and encourages designers to come up with nonsense like this. So, in an almost certainly vain attempt to close the sluice gates, we would encourage people to read the source material. In this case that is a piece of research in The Lancet medical journal published yesterday. What the report actually concludes is that ‘in addition to morbidity and premature mortality, physical inactivity is responsible for a substantial economic burden. This paper provides further justification to prioritise promotion of regular physical activity worldwide as part of a comprehensive strategy to reduce non-communicable diseases’. In other words, it supports an existing, well understood conclusion.
Changing just one seated meeting per week at work into a walking meeting increased the work-related physical activity levels of white-collar workers by 10 minutes, according to a new study published by public health researchers with the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The study, published June 24, 2016 in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's journal Preventing Chronic Disease, suggests a possible new health promotion approach to improving the health of millions of white-collar workers who spend most of their workdays sitting in chairs.
Our computers have rapidly shrunk from room-size behemoths to hulking desktops to the svelte laptops that now dominate modern offices. What haven't changed much are the tables and chairs that the computers (and we) sit on. A new integrated workspace from the Altwork company, appropriately named the Station, has been designed to replace both pieces of furniture while giving you more flexibility in how you interact with your computer. I was recently able to get a butts-on demo of the Station, and the only contortion I had to perform was wrapping my mind around its massive price tag.
If there's one thing that the abundance of research on healthy workplaces makes clear, it's that there's no clear solution to the problems caused by our desk jobs.
Sitting all day is (predictably) terrible for you—according to the American Cancer Society, it will shorten anyone's average life-span. But standing all day isn't good for your either. It can lead to long-term muscle fatigue and back problems. Even working out won't help: According to research published by the Annals of Internal Medicine, an after-work workout won't do much to offset the damage done by sitting.
I love my standing desk. Throughout the workday, I like to stand for 20 minutes or so every hour to keep my energy up, while relieving my aching back and butt from poor sitting posture. I like to think that it’s a healthy habit that’s keeping me fit, active, and maybe even a few pounds lighter. But new research disagrees.
Vintage furniture is hot these days, primarily for their aesthetic value rather than their function. And if there's a single piece of vintage seating furniture that doesn't get enough love, it's industrial stools. It's no secret why: This is an object associated with work, actual physical labor, which has no place in today's world of cushy couches and ergonomic office chairs.
Sit-to-stand working is a hugely popular trend, and with good reason: height adjustable work stations bring with them a myriad of benefits to health, wellness and productivity.
However, as with any new trend, it isn’t always easy for organizations to make the switch and adapt to their new working practices. Sometimes, it can be a real struggle to adjust to sit-to-stand working, and the new design can bring with it a raft of unintended issues.
Toss a sliver of information into the great stream of public narrative and see what happens to it. There it goes, briefly visible on the surface then consumed; part of the stream but no longer visible. A perfect example of this is provided by a new piece of research carried out by the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health into the effects of standing at work on a small sample of call centre workers. While the results of the study are impressive, notably a 46 percent increase in productivity, by the time the story was reported on Inc.com, the 167 call centre workers had suddenly morphed into everybody. It should go without saying that the headline ‘Your Productivity Will Increase by 46 percent if You Stand at Your Desk’ does not reflect the conclusions of the original research. The statements by the researchers suggesting that the study is significant with regard to call centre staff but merely indicative of a wider issue go ignored.
Research by the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health found that employees in a call center who used standing desks for a six-month period were 46 percent more productive than colleagues who used standard desks.
Every day millions of workers sit at their desks and computer workstations for hours on end, unaware of the toll it’s taking on their bodies. In many offices, improper monitor positions and rigid sitting postures are causing employees back pain, neck pain, eye strain, and other Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs). Furthermore, sedentary behaviors and static postures can even result in metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions — including increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels — that occur together to increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
Raise your hand if you’re one of the many hunched over your keyboard at a desk in a not-so-comfortable office chair. Unfortunately this is the norm for the majority of the U.S. workforce. The Bureau of Labor statistics reports that we spend between 8 and 9 hours each day seated, in sedentary positions.
The INTERNET OF THINGS, smaller and faster notebooks, and sweeping changes to corporate IT policies all point to one universal truth: the OFFICE OF THE FUTURE is here. The problem is that most workspaces are stuck in the past. It is important that individual workspace design evolves to support today’s technology needs while also providing a HEALTHY and COMFORTABLE user experience.
If you work in front of a computer all day like I do, you know that it’s pretty impossible not to slouch. It just happens. That’s why I wanted to try one of the many wearables out there that promise to correct your posture, and make you happier in the process. I picked the Lumo Lift, a small posture-tracking device that’s been around for a couple of years and has received pretty good reviews. My experience with it can be summarized as this: it was a huge relief to turn the Lift off at the end of the day.
Your eyes sting, your vision is getting blurry and your head hurts. The computer screen that you've been staring at for the past six hours seems so bright that you want to shut your eyes.
Some people spend more than 6-10 hours a day in front of computers. They are so absorbed in their activities that they do not pay attention to their postures. Some might be bending heavily to look at the screen or keyboard while others may be typing hard with their wrists being suspended in air all the while. Incorrect postures lead to health problems such as back pain, shoulder and wrist pain, burning feet, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and vision loss – especially if you are over 40. In this article, we discuss the correct posture to sit in front of computer.
Changes to the nature of work, where it takes place and the things we use to complete it are always constrained by one particular eternally fixed element; the human being. The unchanging individual at the centre of it all is the thing that makes us return to old ideas time and again and ensures that whatever we do, something like it will have been done before in some way or other. That goes for products like the office cubicle as well as apparently modern principles such as ergonomics. The term ergonomic may have been coined as recently as the 1950s and we might associate it primarily with the ways in which we use computers, but the ideas behind it have always been with us since we started using tools. Looking back, what we learn is that people have been writing guides to good ergonomics at least since the early seventeenth Century.
