Abstract
Nowadays sedentary behaviors such as prolonged sitting have become a predominant element of our lives. Particularly in the office environment, many people spend the majority of their working day seated in front of a computer. In this paper, we investigate the adoption of a physically active work process within an activity-promoting office workspace design that is composed of a sitting and a standing workstation. Making use of multiple distributed monitors, this environment introduces diversity into the office workflow through the facilitation of transitions between different work-related tasks, workstations, and work postures. We conducted a background study to get a better understanding of how people are performing their daily work within this novel workspace. Our findings identify different work patterns and basic approaches for physical activity integration, which indicate a number of challenges for software design. Based on the results of the study, we provide design implications and highlight new directions in the field of HCI design to support seamless alternation between different postures while working in such an environment. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.