ActiveOffice: Designing for Physical Activity in Digital Workplaces

Over the past centuries, our lives have become increasingly sedentary. Having an office job today, all too often involves sitting at a computer, performing the same small repetitive movements with our fingers, hands, and eyes over and over again. The shape, size and form of computing technology have influenced and placed limits on the physical movements that we perform throughout the day. Our research thus focuses on the question how human-computer interaction can fluently embed interactive technology into our workplaces to allow for more physically active working styles, and re-introduce diverse bodily movements in to our work routine. The present work describes how we are approaching this topic from a dual design perspective: macro-level support of smooth transition between different work postures, and micro-level design of bodily interaction technologies that increasingly acknowledge the richness of human motor skills.