With a few tips on ergonomics, designers have the power to create a positive environment for the work-from-home client.

Joint disease. Herniated discs. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Many workers don’t realize it, but the office can be a hazardous workplace—and oftentimes, it all comes down to whether or not you have an ergonomic setup. In the work-from-home era, the onus increasingly falls on designers to create a space that protects their clients’ health and well-being, both on- and off-the-clock. “The most important body part to protect [while working] is the spine, and having a science-based piece of equipment to support the body is the number one priority,” says Rebecca Horton, a workplace well-being knowledge lead at Herman Miller. Not making an effort to get office ergonomics right, she says, “would be like investing in beautiful bedroom furniture and beautiful lighting, then having a really terrible mattress. You would be miserable in that space, and you would be in pain.” 

The concept of ergonomics goes back hundreds of years, and our thinking about the body’s mechanics has evolved. In 1748, it was controversial when French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de LaMettrie concluded that man and machine were actually “quite similar”; it wasn’t until the 1980s that our modern understanding of ergonomics gained mainstream momentum in the furniture category with the rise of computer usage at the office. By then, experts in industrial and manufacturing environments had begun to acknowledge that certain tasks were prone to causing injury, and specialists were discovering the links between repetitive motion, awkward posture, force, vibration and injury. The biggest problem, they discovered, was that most designs to date had been entirely fixed in nature: The heights of desks, chairs and monitors were all set in one position, forcing workers to conform their bodies to the built environment. A host of postural issues were adding insult to injury—simple, mindless behaviors such as shrugging your shoulders to type, anchoring your wrists on a sharp desk edge, leaning toward your computer screen without using a chair’s backrest or situating a computer monitor too far above or below your natural viewing angle, all of which compound to create negative health effects in the long run.