‘Active Design’ aims to turn workers into walkers

By John Stodder

The day many Americans start working full-time is the day their health begins to deteriorate.

On that day, many workers begin plunking themselves down in a deadly rotation of car seats, office chairs and living-room sofas for the majority of their waking hours.

Medical researchers say that pattern jeopardizes the office-worker’s health, and foresee specific dire consequences. They say the pattern – drive to work, ride elevators to offices, sit all day – contributes to the epidemics of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, and increases the risks of cardiovascular disease and cancer. (See “The risks of bodies at rest.”)

For that reason, many architects and urban planners have in recent years begun a campaign to make the workplace healthier through design.

This informal but passionate movement – known as “active design” – aims to dismantle the traditional workplace and adjust the traditional workday to achieve a simple result: to increase walking.

Active designers – a loose alliance of architects, interior designers, urban planners, even doctors from the sidelines – started shuffling such mundane appurtenances as printers and coffeemakers with a non-economic goal: to improve the health of office workers.

The movement is still at the beginning stages. Lisa Pool, interiors principal at the architecture firm Perkins+Will’s Minneapolis office, estimated the trend is only two or three years old.

Unlike environmental or “green” design, for which the U.S. Green Building Council supports sustainable building construction, there is no organization keeping track of active design projects. But Pool and other designers say the movement has found a surprising amount of acceptance from business owners and office managers when it is pitched to them because, up to a point, active design saves money.

Follow the money

Recent history, specifically the Great Recession and the passage of Obamacare, has helped the trend along, designers say.

Before the economy descended like a Slinky, a company would reward its stars with huge corner offices, limo-size desks and cushy chairs that, it turns out, were like guns to their occupants’ head.

To the extent managers allow it, active design can deconstruct the entire idea of how office territory is marked. Joan Blumenfeld, a principal at Perkins+Will in New York, said she advises clients to replace most private offices with a combination of workstations and more meeting rooms.

Employees are issued notebook computers and mobile devices anyway. In an active design office, those devices become employees’ virtual offices that follow them wherever they go. Progressive furniture-makers like Steelcase make benches at which collaborating employees can sit and work together.

Among some managers, conditioned to see a private office as a perk of success, the new design concept was not a hit at first, Blumenfeld said. Investment bankers and attorneys sometimes resist active design because they don’t want to give up the ego satisfaction and comfort of the big, corner office.

But the Great Recession was a great recruiter for active design. Opposition to it eroded when business leaders realized it allows squeezing as many as 15 percent more employees into the same space, Blumenfeld said, which meant a company could add employees without leasing more space, or lease a smaller but redesigned office to house the same number of workers. Togetherness is another principle of active design.

Obamacare, more formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, has helped too, Pool said, by throwing a spotlight on the employers’ health care costs. The same cost-cutting impulse that drives managers to schedule workday aerobics classes and encourage preventive health care is also selling to them the benefits of active design.

Working out of hazardous designs

The traditional American workplace and surroundings, active-design advocates say, were the results of ignorance.

“We didn’t know that what we were doing to ourselves in the way we built our transportation, buildings and communities.” lamented James P. Cramer, founder and chairman of the Greenway Group, an Atlanta-based architectural consulting firm. “We are basically not evolving except to get fatter and less healthy.”

Requiring workers to get up more frequently and walk some distance when they do means dismantling some of the efficiencies of labor-saving technology, which active designers call hazards.

For instance, a plan based on sheer efficiency would dictate that office printers be close to the employees who use them most. Similarly, placing such office amenities as refrigerators, coffeemakers and microwaves close to the largest cluster of employees would seem sensible.

But reaching for a printout instead of walking for it burns no calories.

That’s why, with each new project she embarks on, Pool asks: “Would it be possible to leave work healthier than when we arrived every day?”

For instance, Pool tries to limit the number of printers and kitchens and makes sure they are far apart. That puts her and her clients in conflict sometimes with printer vendors like Xerox that are motivated to install more printers, not fewer, and will produce reports defending their proposals. She admitted that some managers are swayed by such arguments, envisioning productivity taking a hit as employees wander the office, firming up their quadriceps in search of a print job.

Stair worship

When workers walk up stairs, weight goes down.

The active design movement loves staircases, the kinds with wide steps softened by carpet runners, with quarter- or half-landings, and decorative balustrades, which tall buildings featured prominently before the first office elevator appeared in 1857.

“Every building ought to have an attractive stairway,” said Dr. Richard Jackson, chairman of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, and former head of environmental health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

In a CDC office complex he helped design, Jackson insisted the landings be fun and sociable places to network while employees rested before climbing the next flight. Some flights even had punching bags.

But not every building owner or commercial tenant wants to spend on a show-stopping staircase. The less expensive option is to improve the fire stairs, according to Blumenfeld.

The fire stairs in most buildings are bleak, dark and lonely. Building codes require the entire stair enclosure be non-flammable, which Blumenfeld said rules out such touches as carpeting, pretty railings and artwork.

Health devotees exercise by walking the stairs, but the point of active design is to prod even slackers to use them.

For Medtronic’s headquarters in Minneapolis, Pool’s team designed wider-than-normal fire stairs, bright lighting, lively colors and non-flammable windows, all to give stair-climbers a reason to keep coming back.

Signs encouraged stairway use, and the doors to the stairwells were left open except in case of fire.

Some designers go further, creating buildings that require the able-bodied to use at least some stairs, through a design known as “skip-stop.”

In the California Department of Transportation’s Los Angeles headquarters, the central elevators stop only on every third floor. For those floors not served by an elevator stop, there is a modernistic, wood-balustrade-lined staircase by which the CalTrans workers can reach the floor above or below.

The Journal of Public Health Policy in 2009 performed an employee survey about CalTrans’ building.

Of the 299 who responded, only 12 percent exercised as much as 30 minutes, three times a week. But nearly 73 percent of the employees used the skip-stairs daily, with 31 percent climbing four to six flights per day.

Fighting suburban sprawl

For active-design advocates, office interiors are one of two battlegrounds. The other is where many workers begin and end their workdays: their cars.

Long commute times are tied to poor cardiovascular health, according to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. In each of the 10 most populous metropolitan areas, commutes average more than a half-hour each way.

Active-design principles increasingly are a part of town and city planning, with the goal to create walking opportunities for residents and to make it possible for people to work within walking or biking distance of home.

American suburbs originally were touted as the healthier alternatives to the smoke and foulness of city life. But according to Jackson, because they walk more, residents of cities like New York tend to be seven pounds lighter than suburbanites.

Active-design developments adhere to a philosophy, sometimes called Traditional Neighborhood Developments or New Urbanism. Baxter Village in Fort Mill, S.C., a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., is a “hybrid TND,” said Dan Mummey, director of residential and commercial construction for Clear Springs Development Company. His firm masterminded the 1,033-acre project.

In marketing materials, the 14-year-old development is described as a pedestrian-oriented community with the convenience of urban living. That means trails for hikers, bikers and runners, and sidewalks connecting homes to stores, restaurants, schools and offices.

Mummey said he frequently visits the development and takes pleasure in watching the runners and bicyclists using the trails, and the children playing in the public parks. The children have no choice; the lot sizes are smaller as a matter of principle, leaving little room for backyards. But because of the 500 acres of open space, kids have plenty of room to run around and play together.

“We have a myriad of ways to help people get walking,” Mummey said.

The developers set aside enough commercially zoned land to support hundreds of jobs that would be available to the residents of the town’s 1,450 households. At last count, Mummey said, 1,200 people go to work within the confines of Baxter Village.

Many of the jobs serve the community directly, such as trainers at the YMCA, or waiters and waitresses. The development also has professional offices and medical facilities, and many homesites are designed with granny flats – detached residences that traditionally allowed families to house aging parents – that are often used instead as home offices.

UCLA’s Jackson predicts that the emerging generation of young workers, obsessed with a healthy blend of work and recreation, will demand more towns like Baxter Village.

“The Millennials,” Jackson said, “don’t want to duplicate the rat race of their parents.”

John Stodder is the roving Web editor for The Dolan Co.