PositionPeak: Stimulating Position Changes During Meetings

Abstract

In office environments, workers spend the majority of their workday sitting in a static position behind a desk or around a meeting table. Prolonged sitting time and sedentary behavior have severe negative health effects. Through this explorative study, we studied how different postures can be stimulated during meetings. We designed PositionPeak: three pieces of furniture aimed at composing a 'dynamic meeting room', subtly encouraging participants to avoid static postures. We video-recorded 5 meetings (N=16) and coded the number of position changes per participant. Participants also filled out a pre-and post-questionnaire about their experience. Our findings show that PositionPeak triggers people to adopt a variety of postures. Participants on average experienced a more efficient meeting but reported physical discomfort with some objects. We discuss the influence of PositionPeak on the meetings' social dynamics, the acceptance of new conventions and design recommendations for new meeting facilities.

Bringing Movement to Digital Tasks at the Office: Designing an Acceptably Active Interface Interaction for Sending Emails

“…Sedentary behavior and physical inactivity have a profound impact on workers' health and well-being [3,16]. Health promotion interventions in the workplace can help address these challenges through interactive technologies [4,14] that stimulate people to change posture [5], take breaks [20] or track physical activity [18]. Systems that promote physically active ways of working (as compared to very common break prompting interventions) have traditionally been designed as standing desks or treadmill desks [37].…”

“…Another illustration of embedding physical activity as a core aspect of the design itself is Position Peak [5], a modular meeting room furniture that promote changing sitting postures. Initial empirical insights suggest that the design was effective in triggering more movement and could have side benefits in terms of creativity and social dynamics.…”

Habilyzer: Empowering Office Workers to Investigate their Working Habits using an Open-Ended Sensor Kit

“…Literature ofers a myriad of recommendations to improve ofce workers' health and vitality. Sedentary behavior and sitting time [6,32] are often emphasized as a main concerns, leading to various design interventions both traditional [7,10] and speculative [8,9]. The efects of several characteristics of the physical work environment (e.g., noise, air quality, temperature, light) on the users is also widely acknowledged, on both the well-being and productivity aspects [1,27,33,38].…”

The Office Jungle: Exploring Unusual Ways of Working through Bodily Experimentations

“…A third example using the office chair as a stereotypical artefact embodying a critique of the status quo is Ivy [6], an office chair that represents employees' sitting time through growing ivy strands, eventually yet aesthetically rooting them to their seats. Other designers attempted to rethink the office environment in order to reduce sedentary behaviour: PositionPeak [5] is a set of unconventional office meeting furniture triggering position changes. It was inspired by another project that has raised discussion: 'the End of Sitting' [2].…”