Cogito Ergo(nomics) Sum (part 2)

So, there I was, with my little diagram, my measuring tapes, clipboard and the orders to get everyone ergonomically satisfied as quickly as possible. According to this model it should easy to put a worker's body into correct positions and have everything fall into place!

Nothing in my paperwork prepared me for how little my evaluations would be appreciated. One of the guys in the office started calling me "The Posture Nazi" by the time I returned from the ergonomics orientation. The manager told me to get it done and over with. I realized that I'd been handed this duty because the manager didn't want an outsider coming in and making any big changes.

The first odd thing that I found was that just about everyone had pain, even though, for the most part, they already sat at the perfect combination of ergonomic angles. Everyone sat for their entire day, both for work, then for commuting and for relaxing at home. I measured their workstations and ordered tray tables. Someone needed their screen raised. Another person needed it lowered for their bifocals. We got a roller mouse for one woman and a wrist rest for someone else. The guy who called me "The Posture Nazi" refused any changes at all, but I suppose that was his choice, despite the fact that he suffered from more pain than anyone in the office. I started to teach some of the Pilates basics to one woman with back pain. After about a month sneaking in workstation alterations here and there, the only person with improvement in their pain was the one who started to take short breaks to do the very easy Pilates I showed her - constructive rest, pelvic clocks, bridges, upper abdominal curls and prone extensions. Something clicked. It was the way they worked, not the sitting position.

Then there's this obsession with chairs. I did an image search for "ergonomics" to see what came up and noticed that most of them were of people or stylized models of a human form in a chair. Everything in the office happens in chairs, and as work hours grow and personal time shrinks, more and more time is spent folded in ninety degree angles.

It made me think of something that both one of my art teachers and a dance composition teacher said about the image of a chair being a stand-in for a person. The image is potent even without a person in the frame. Chairs are a way to think of and contain the idea of a person, which has its good and bad points.

Enter any office first thing in the morning and there will be rows or cubicles of empty chairs. The worker chooses their station and sits, conforming to the shape of the chair. Each worker has identical working arrangements.

Imagine, then, what it means to see all these empty chairs at silent desks. It's probably a familiar image. I've always had this feeling that a bunch of empty chairs is almost haunted.

Then try this image on for size:

Imagine if offices had different areas and ways to work. The worker enters and sees two areas: a bright, open place where thinking on foot is encouraged and another section with seating and tables at different levels reserved for quiet activities. Balls are available, especially in the open area. In the quiet section stations with low tables which requires that people sit on the floor would be surrounded by low pads for knee and lotus-style sitting. A series of recliners where workers could read, view images or rest during breaks could be to the far side of the quiet area. There would be some ninety degree tables with chairs and some stations with tall tables for people who are standing. There might even be a platform and an adjustable table on a tall platform for those individuals who think best up high! Computing would be mobile, either with laptops or interchangeable drives so that a person could work in various places throughout the day.

The second office seems like a more natural place for free-flowing ideas to me, partly because people can simply be mobile and also because they can sit or stand in ways that support them as productive workers.

During that same year that I started on ergonomics I found an amazing book by Galen Cranz, called The Chair, which says that human beings are not ninety degree animals. Human bodies were meant for squatting and perching, and not designed to sit for long periods. She talks about the larger cultural picture of how and why people sit the way that they do. Ironically, she teaches in the Department of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.

Here's a terrific interview with her:
http://bodyconsciousdesign.com/uploads/interview_galen_cranz_portland.pdf

I began to rethink the idea of the seated workplace, in what now seems like a very unnatural position. We sit at computers for so long when we work. Our minds, forearms and hands are so active that it's as if all of our surface consciousness moves into those places. When we think hard for a long time we fall into gestures and patterns that come from a very deep place, like a favorite sleeping position that we only find when we are completely unconscious. Heads cock to the side, feet leave the ground and find perches under chairs or tables, or get propped up on the desk so that the chair gets pushed back into a lounging position. Our weight shifts to one sitzbone, causing us to curve to one side. We slouch, or we lean forward. I have caught myself in a twisted position with left foot tucked under the chair leg, toes turned under, the right leg straddling the corner of the chair, foot braced to the side as if I were trying to escape, all my weight on my right sitzbone, leaning forward into the computer as I typed, as if my body were making subconscious commentary on my commitment to a particular task.

Ergonomics, at least the flavor of it that was handed to me in that folder, had very little to do with the rightness of the body. It had everything to do with wringing the most efficient work out of a body in the shortest possible time with as little kvetching from the body's owner as possible. It was a way to conform the human being to their task instead of adapting the job to the person. "Posture Nazi," indeed.

Cranz talks about how the active body should lean forward, while the passive one leans back. My later training in Judith Aston's work also confirmed that, as did what I found over years of working with clients and myself. A slouch is not only a natural position, but also a correct one for certain tasks and states of mind. The problem is that the seated worker who uses a computer is a strange mixture of passive and active. "Sitting up straight," then, does not solve the issue and potentially creates more problems. Many of the other peculiar habits that show up are also important to a person's physical and mental function. In some ways those habits are ways to adapt to the unnatural position that the ninety degree chair forces the body to take, as well as the long hours spent in it. 

No matter what a person does, their body is along for the ride and is constantly in some sort of motion. Even asleep, every part of the body continues to move, down to the smallest fascial cells. If there is an answer to the question of how we change our working culture it may be to honor the human need to move and rest according to the needs of the body and mind. We need to get up, to think on our feet, to sit low and relearn how to squat or sit on the floor, to shake it out and bounce on a ball or to pace.

Another way to think of a chair (at least on this blog!) is as a platform for our sitzbones to be the primary receptors of gravity instead of our feet. (See? I did get there eventually!) In this case, a "supportive" chair is as misguided as "supportive" shoes.

Throwing away our ninety-degree office chairs is very much like getting rid of our shoes and touching the ground once more with our feet. It's another way to say that the ground is, in some ways, all we need to define who we are and where we stand...or sit.

(Chair image by Quinn Dombrowski.)