Workplace Environmental Design in Architecture for Public Health ― Impacts on Occupant Space Use and Physical Activity

This concise volume analyzes the potential for the workplace environment—where so many people spend so much of their day—to improve workers’ capacity for health and wellness. It pinpoints the link between sedentary lifestyles and poor health, and explores the role of office spatial design in encouraging physical activity to promote physical activity, health and prevent disease. The featured research study tracks workers’ movement in a variety of office layouts, addressing possible ways movement-friendly design can co-exist with wireless communication, paperless offices, and new corporate concepts of productivity. From these findings, the author’s conclusions extend public health concepts to recognize that influencing population-wide levels of activity through office architectural design alone may be possible.

This SpringerBrief is comprised of chapters on :

• Physical activity and disease: Theory and practice
  
• Space-use and the history of the office building
• Identifying factors of the office architectural design that influence movement,
• Interdisciplinary research methods in studying worker physical activity, decision-making and office design characteristics
  
• The KINESIS model for simulating physical activity in office environments
  

Stamatina Th. Rassia is an architect engineer holding a diploma in Architecture Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in Greece. She has an MPhil in Environmental Design in Architecture and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Dr. Rassia is an expert on topics of public health promotion by architectural design.