‘Office of the future’

Kaiserslautern / DPA

When Professor Sabine Hoffmann invites you to sit down, there’s a surprise in store: the individualized office chairs she’s helping to develop can ventilate you from below.
At the push of a button, their little built-in fans can blow air on the back or bottom. Men in particular like this feature, she says, as it helps cool and dry them off on warm days when they get sweaty and itchy from long contact with upholstery.
Hoffmann, 44, teaches facilities management and building engineering at the Kaiserslautern University of Technology. The university is collaborating with the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) on enhancing office environments to boost workers’ well-being and, consequently, productivity.
In a laboratory recently opened at the DFKI that’s dubbed the Living Lab Smart Office Space, engineers are working on technical concepts for “the office of the future” and testing them. In Hoffmann’s view, smart employers will ensure that a workplace isn’t too cold, too hot or too loud.
“A worker who isn’t comfortable doesn’t work gladly and is less productive,” she said, conceding that “it’s quite difficult to create a room climate that satisfies everyone.”
So the scientists are looking for solutions that are tailored to the individual, as well as being energy-saving.
Many men in sit-down jobs squirm and even get heat rashes, so a cooler office chair could make them more productive. Many women, conversely, tend to complain that seats are too cold.
That’s why the lab came up with the ventilating office chair, which also has a built-in heater. Hoffmann’s team conducted a study that helped the manufacturer optimize the product.
“The ventilators were too loud in the beginning, and the chair wasn’t comfortable enough,” she said.
A new version is now on the market, and a bargain it’s not. The chair with a heater and ventilation in the seat sells for 884 euros, and with those features in the back as well it costs 987 euros.
A further study will examine the reaction of workers in an open-space office to a lamp with a built-in anti-noise feature. The head-high device can produce a monotone, fan-like whirring sound over a desk to mask distracting voices of colleagues. The effect is local, not central via a loudspeaker system, which Hoffmann says was tested and found by workers to be annoying.
“Workers want to be able to control their environmental conditions themselves,” she remarked.
DFKI computer scientists are testing how heat and noise levels affect alertness and whether measures such as sound masking work. For example, they track the eye movements of test persons reading a text in varying environmental conditions, which indicate whether they’re having more or fewer problems understanding it.
The sound-masking lamp is currently being tested in practice. The response so far has been varied, Hoffmann says, and conclusions can’t be drawn until tests have been completed.
Already available is an interior lamp that gives off light with properties similar to daylight. Photoreceptors in the eye are known to increase production of a hormone with a stimulating effect, Hoffmann says. The scientists want to find out if the stimulation is significant and can be controlled.
Ultimately, such lamps would work in concert with the glazing on buildings to give office staff the most stimulating light at any hour of the clock without glare, but of course that would mean redesigning building exteriors.
The Kaiserslautern University of Technology and DFKI aren’t the only ones doing research in this field in Germany, where more than 22 million people – about half of the working population – work at least occasionally in an office, according to Barbara Schwaibold, spokeswoman for the German Interior Business Association. Other labs include the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
With a tendency toward larger offices nowadays, many workers often complain about noisy surroundings or temperatures that are either too high or too low, she says.
“Individualized controls can help in this regard,” she explains.