Photo: Courtesy of Pixabay.com
Chances are if you work at an office job, you’re probably spending an abundant amount of time sitting at your desk, making/ answering calls and pounding away on a keyboard. For many, there is often little time left at the end of a long work day to fit in any type of extracurricular physical activity. It is widely believed that employees who are active throughout the work day are more content and, in turn, tend to be more productive. Businesses around the country are trending towards providing more active work environments by promoting a variety of physical activities during work hours. Some of these methods are blatant like giving an employee the option to swap out their chair for a stability ball for a short period of time or placing “treadmill desks” conveniently around the office so that work and working out can be accomplished simultaneously. Other methods are not so obvious and are simply concealed in the strategic design of an office’s layout.
One of the architectural and design firms at the forefront of these innovative, health conscious layouts is Perkins + Will, a company who proclaims that they were “founded on the belief that design has the power to transform lives and enhance communities.” Along with indoor and outdoor spaces committed to exercising, some of the strategies that go into their designs include staircases that are displayed prominently out in the open, effectively encouraging the use of taking the stairs in favor of taking an elevator. Another stratagem used is the design of a central hub within the office for the purpose of printing and copying, compelling workers to walk from their workspaces to retrieve necessary documents.
Perkins + Will has been a strong proponent for integrating these design ideas on a broader scale throughout the city, working with both the Department of Health and the Department of Design.
-by James Baginski
