Office Ergonomics

In This Page:

• The Needless Problem
• Encountering OOS
• My Solution
• Photos
• External Links

The Needless Problem

Human bodies evolved through standing, walking, reclining and sitting down. Chairs, and desks, are recent additions to our patterns of daily movements, and appeared too late in the evolutionary cycle for our bodies to account for them. As so many ergonomics studies have shown, human bodies adapt poorly to most desks and almost all chairs, and the result is back pain.

Add computers, and especially the mouse, to that mixture and it gets even worse – Occupational Overuse Syndromes such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Repetitive Strain Injury are rife in the workplace nowadays. Almost every office worker I know has back pain and OOS to some degree. Many are crippled by them to the point where they have to give up work altogether, costing the Australian economy billions of dollars per year.

Yet, this is a needless problem – it need never become one at all if those responsible for equipping offices pay attention to how the human body evolved to work, and choose furnishings and computer input devices designed to accommodate bodies as they are. The vast majority of office furnishings do anything but that – instead they demand their users adapt to them, and they can’t.

I am disgusted by how “human-unfriendly” 99 percent of work spaces are.

… Tom Peters on offices, Design (Tom Peters Essentials)

Shock Finding! - Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld Stands to Work Without Legs Collapsing!

Encountering OOS

I first came across workers with OOS in the UK, at an advertising agency. Every designer there proudly sported his surgical scars – running from their wrists all the way up their arm almost to the bend. RSI surgery and the pain they suffered beforehand, was considered a badge of honour, of manly pride. I was horrified.

Other colleagues of mine – the older ones in Production – occupied custom-built high-tech chairs that were created to the twists and turns their bodies had acquired after years of bending over layout and imposition tables, process cameras and typesetting machines. The younger ones, who’d been brought up as computer users at home and in the production office, were already developing OOS in their mouse hands, premature poor sight, chronic headaches, hunched backs and back pain.

I didn’t want them nor me to suffer the same fate as the designers, so I went off to research preventative measures. Luckily London has a well-developed collection of ergonomics experts and I made good use of their knowledge as well as my colleagues’ experiences.

My Solution

My first introduction to computing was at university, with mainframes and minicomputers, and then Unix graphics workstations before Apple’s personal computers became powerful enough for high end graphics. I’d encountered workstation keyboards with trackballs embedded in them, and pen tablets, way before I’d laid hands on a mouse.

Since mice were the cause of the OOS my colleagues suffered, it was natural to go looking for the latest incarnations of trackballs and mice, and I found them readily enough. Both worked fine – I bought a trackball and made a mental note to get a pen tablet later as then-current prices were a little steep. The biggest advantage of both over a mouse is that your hand is in the closest thing to a handshake position, the palm vertical, instead of palms-down as a mouse demands. I’ve read numerous ergonomics studies showing that the handshake position is the best for the hand when working with computers.

Later on, when equipping my home office, I bought a pen tablet, a Bambach Saddle Seat and looked for a standing desk but couldn’t find one where I was living at the time. I made my own standing desk from a now-discontinued desk and extras I bought at Ikea – it’s rough but effective. Most of the time, at home, I stand to work. I’ve often been told that standing to work all day long is impossible, and that my legs would surely collapse under the strain, but I’ve never found that to be the case at all. Besides, I have my high Saddle Seat to sit on if I feel like it – I’m doing so as I type right now.

Over the years I have tried a number of unconventional keyboards, and owned a Microsoft curvy keyboard for a while until the spongy feel of the keys got just that little too much and I discarded it. Problem is that few non-flat keyboards ever seem to make it to Australia, and although I’ve seen some interesting ones reviewed in foreign magazines and online, I’ve never had the chance to try them out. Except, that is, for the SafeType vertical keyboard. It’s not perfect – what is? – but it is the best I have tried so far, so much so that I hope to get one, imported from the US manufacturer some day soon.

I have also considered trying out speech recognition software, and spoke with New York Times technology columnist David Pogue about his experiences with it when he visited Sydney once, but the downside is it works best in a very quiet environment, and not the average noisy office. The latest versions of this kind of software sound promising though.

Here is what I am using right now:

• Kensington Expert Mouse trackball – on my left, for its 4 programmable buttons and its high speed across the monitor.
• Wacom Bamboo pen tablet – on my right, for its accuracy and fine control.
• Customized standing desk – cobbled together from parts from Ikea.
• Bambach Saddle Seat – full height version with back and footrest ring.
• Work lighting – decent lighting is far too often overlooked by computer users. I have a daylight-balance work light directed at the keyboard. The light holds a compact fluorescent lamp that outputs at 5000-degrees Kelvin – artificial daylight.

‘Sitting is Baaaaad for You, Okay?’:

That statement, above, is the implication of a spate of recently published scientific research reports. Research continues on the negative outcome of sitting all day, to work or watch TV. Even sitting down most of the day and not all of it is detrimental to our health.

These reports, some of them linked to at the base of this post, indicate sitting is bad for our bones, our joints, our heart, our circulation, our muscles, increases diabetes, and contributes to chronic headaches, migraines and other pain that costs Australia over $34 billion per year.

Despite these reports being issued for some years now, it is amazing how beliefs that we must all sit to work are so persistent.

Here are some relevant comments that have been made to me during discussions in recent years, by friends, relatives, workmates, OHS (Occupational Health & Safety) officers, WorkCover officials, office ergonomics experts, supervisors, and interviewers. I am quoting verbatim.

• “It’s impossible to work standing up.”
• “It is impossible to use a computer while standing”
• “You cannot use a keyboard while standing up. That’s not possible.”
• “There is no such thing as pointing and clicking without using a mouse. Put up with it.”
• “You women are always whinging and complaining.”
• “There is no such thing as a standing desk.”
• “Grin and bear it, and shut up about it.”
• “There is no such thing as a keyboard that is not flat.”
• “Walking around your cubicle thirty seconds every half hour is more than enough exercise for anyone.”
• “There is no such thing as a trackball or a pen tablet. You’re making that up.”
• “If you bring in your own trackball then everyone will want one.”
• “If you bring your own special chair into work then everyone will want one.”
• “No other worker will tolerate you standing up to work.”
• “You can’t sit on that funny seat! You’ll fall off!”
• “No, I’m not going to try sitting on that. My ‘nads are too precious to me.”
• “Lots of people ask for those, but there’s no call for ‘em, so we don’t stock them.”
• “You can’t use that thing [a pen tablet] to point and click! That’s only for drawing.”
• “If you stand to work all day, your legs will collapse from beneath you.”
• “Sit up straight at all times! Ninety degrees is best!”

Photos:

External Links:

• A Field Guide to Developers – blog post by Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software. Note his commentary on Aeron chairs, and private offices versus open plan offices.
• AUZSpec – Ergonomic office furnishings and products specialist in Silverwater, Sydney, New South Wales.
• BaackPain – Better Backs campaign of the UK government Health & Safety Executive.
• BackCare – the Charity for Healthier Backs
• Chronic pain an annual $34b drain – report by Herald Sun newspaper on the Access Economics and MBF Foundation report on chronic pain in Australia.
• Ergoblog – Office ergonomics, reviews, voice recognition software, and dealing with repetitive strain injuries.
• ergonomicoffice – Canberra-based online supplier.
• Get On Up – website of The Get On Up Campaign – Why Sitting is Bad For You.
• MacWorld’s Guide to Healthy Computing – Simple strategies for staying pain-free while on the job.
• Office workers risk back strain – BBC News report.
• Role of Low Energy Expenditure and Sitting in Obesity, Metabolic Syndrome, Type 2 Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease – PDF of research report by Hamilton, Hamilton & Zderic, published in Diabetes journal.
• SafeType – the SafeType ergonomic keyboard.
• SafeType at YouTube.com
• School books – a pain in the back – BBC News report.
• Sitting around is bad for your heart – CBS4 video report, 5th May 2009.
• Sitting straight ‘bad for backs’ – BBC report on research at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada and Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland.
• Sitting Time and Mortality from All Causes, Cardiovascular Disease, and Cancer – research paper by Katzmarzyk, Church, Craig and Bouchard of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, Ottawa, Ontario.
• Stand up, sit down, keep moving, we’ll all be better for it – report on research under way at University of Queensland School of Population Health by Dr Genevieve Healy.
• Standing desk, at Wikipedia.
• The high price of pain: The economic impact of persistent pain in Australia – report by Australia & New Zealand College of Anaethetists Faculty of Pain Medicine on the Access Economics and MBF Foundation report on chronic pain in Australia, with link to the downloadable PDF of the report itself.
• Women ‘putting up with back pain’ – BBC News report.