judith heerwagen | University of Washington (original) (raw)

Papers by judith heerwagen

AAOHN Journal, 1995

ccupational stress is an issue of critical importance to the nation's health care system and to o... more ccupational stress is an issue of critical importance to the nation's health care system and to organizations that must bear the costs of stress related outcomes , including poor job performance, absenteeism, employee dissatisfaction, high turnover, and a variety of health problems (Cooper, 1988; Rossi, 1989). A study by the National Council on Compensation Insurance found that mental stress claims increased five fold in the 5 year period from 1985 to 1990 (Freidman, 1991). Offerman (1990) noted that workers have begun to sue their companies for compensation for stress related illnesses in greater and greater numbers, adding an increasing burden to organizations. Many companies have responded by implementing stress management and occupational health programs. Within these programs, very little attention has been given to the physical work environment as a contrib

Proceedings of the ICE - Urban Design and Planning, 2012

Urban Ecology for Citizens and Planners, 2021

The word biophilia was coined by biologist E.O. Wilson and describes the innate human tendency to... more The word biophilia was coined by biologist E.O. Wilson and describes the innate human tendency to be drawn to the natural world. 1 Biophilic design incorporates real or simulated natural elements in an effort to promote wellbeing. The physical and emotional benefits of a connection to nature have been well documented. For example, patients in hospital rooms with morning sunshine need pain medication about 23 percent less than patients in rooms that only get drab, shadowy afternoon light. 2 According to a study about daylighting in schools, students that had a well-designed skylight in their room, one that diffused the daylight throughout the room and which allowed teachers to control the amount of daylight entering the room, also improved 19-20% faster than those students without a skylight. 3 Biophilic design involves the use of local, natural materials, plants, natural light and ventilation, water, and generally blurring the boundaries between building and landscape. This approach to building design recognizes that the positive experience of natural systems and processes in the built environment is critical to human health, performance, and well-being. A few underlying concepts in biophilic design include: 4

Frontiers in Built Environment, 2019

Biophilic design is one of a number of trending design practices that rely on nature-based system... more Biophilic design is one of a number of trending design practices that rely on nature-based systems, engineering principles and design cues to improve environmental quality, health, and efficiency. Biophilic design integrates but does not appropriate the contributions of other nature-based design techniques precisely because it can act as a platform or "interstitial tissue," providing a connective language/practice/ethos that can unite disparate practices in the built environment more broadly. This paper provides an illustrative compilation of how biophilic design practices can directly support resilience in human health and the built environment on behalf of the International Living Future Institute's Biophilic Design Advisory Board. We strongly advocate the use of metrics related to climate change mitigation as a dimension of performance analysis for biophilic design practices as a demonstration of professional mindfulness and responsibility.

• In response to a request from the Pacific Northwest Laboratory's Analytical Chemistry Upgrades ... more • In response to a request from the Pacific Northwest Laboratory's Analytical Chemistry Upgrades Program, a team was formed to 1) review work environment and productivity research, 2) report the researcli in a manner usable to organizational decision-makers, 3) identify Hartford Site facilities exampies of the work environment principles and research, and 4) publish the review results in a refereed journal. This report summarizes the work envirorment-organizational effectiveness research reviewed, provides the foundation for a publishable article, and outlines the integration of work environment research and organizational effectiveness in continuing improvement programs and strategic planning. The research cited in this review shows that the physical work environment offers a valuable tool that, used wisely, can contribute significantly to the performance of an organization, its bottom-line economics, and the well-being of all of its employees. This finding leads to one central recommendation: • To derive the maximum benefit to the corporation, managers and designers must integrate organizational goals madprograms with work environment design. The process should be a truly interdisciplinary undertaking with a systems orientation which looks at interconnections between events, procedures, people, and disciplines. The project had four primary goals: 1) to provide a research basis for integrating organizational planning and programs with work environment planning and design; 2) to convince managers to integrate work environment planning with organizational development and corporate strategy; 3) to convince facilities planners to incorporate organizational culture, corporate strategy, work process, and individual well-being into the facilities planning process, which includes analysis, design, and evaluation; and 4) to highlight Hartford Site facilities planning and design planning processes which apply the principles of work environment-organizationaleffectiveness research presented in this review. An extensive review of research and theory from the fields of organizational development, management, environmental psychology, and architecture identified numerous ways in which the physical work environment influences behavior and organizational outcomes. While much of the research cited focuses on office environments, the results and design principles and practices are relevant to a full range of settings: laboratories, schools, hospitals, and factories. The major findings of the research reviewed are summarized below in four areas: 1) performance, 2) well-being, 3) image, and 4) turnover and recruitment. iii Performance The designed environment has both direct and indirect effects on individual work performance and organizational effectiveness/productivity. The environment acts in a direct way by creating conditions that make work easy or difficult. Work stations can create physical strain which results in lost efficiency and time, medical claims, and interrupted communication. Work stations that fit the job tasks like a glove can also be created. The physical layout of the work process for both manufacturing and office settings significantly impacts productivity. For example, productivity can be increased by designing the work environment to fit work processes, organizational structure (project teams or loosely coupled project networks), and type of work (data analysis, data entry, and laboratory procedures). Well-Being An environment design affects the health and performance of its employees physiologically, socially, and psychologically. Employee health is affected by the design and maintenance of the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems; the ergonomics of the work station; and the availability of fitness centers and programs. Although a great deal of attention has been paid"to the direct impacts of environments on health and performance, less is known about the relationship between the environment and the social and psychological processes that mediate performance and health outcomes. However, research from _ variety of fields shows that the environment affects health and performance through its effect on psychological processes including motivation, mental stimulation, and attentional efforts; perceived and actual control over the environment (control over room temperature and control over social interaction); privacy; contact with nature; and co-worker interaction. Image of the Organization The image projected by the physical environment not only affects the people working in it, but also the visitors and others whose perceptions of workers are congruent with the visual quality of the environment. People working in pleasant, attractive, and neat environments are perceived by others in a positive light; people working in unpleasant, drab, and untidy environments are commonly perceived in negative terms. To some extent, this image may be why many organizations invest so much money and design effort in their public spaces. Clients and important visitors generally experience only these areas and do not see the back room where most of the day-today work occurs. Thus, visitors are filled with the aura of success and power associated with well-appointed lobbies and expensively furnished board rooms. In contrast, employees who pass through an impressively designed lobby to a drab workspace notice the discrepancy in environments and perceive a message conununicated by the environment that employees are less valued by the organization than its visitors. iv Turnover and Recruitment The loss and retraining of employees result in tremendous costs to an organization. In a number of • studies, work environment facilities have been shown to be linked to reduced turnover and improved recruitment, particularly for high-level professionals. For example, some corporations are now going far beyond offering state-of-the-art equipment to recruit top scientists; they offer aesthetically appealing laboratories, quadrupled benchtop work surface, management-size private offices, and multiple small team meeting areas surrounded by beautiful pastoral landscapes. In addition, initial research efforts have shown that office appearance influences people's evaluations of the appeal of potential jobs.

Environment and Behavior, 2010

The increasingly collaborative nature of knowledge-based work requires workplaces to support both... more The increasingly collaborative nature of knowledge-based work requires workplaces to support both dynamic interactions and concentrated work, both of which are critical for collaboration performance. Given the prevalence of open-plan settings, this requirement has created new challenges for workplace design. Therefore, an understanding of the relationship between the spatial characteristics of workplace settings and the support for collaboration that is perceived by office workers is valuable and timely. Based on a study of 308 office workers in 27 office spaces, this article examines the relationship between a series of workplace spatial characteristics and the support that is perceived by the occupants for collaborations. The spatial characteristics that were examined included individual workstation characteristics that were derived from the literature and a new set of floor-plan layout variables that highlighted shared spaces that are critical for a variety of formal and informal...

Building Research & Information, 2000

Environmental Design and …, 2001

... The challenge of green design is two-fold: to integrate into buildings the positive biophilic... more ... The challenge of green design is two-fold: to integrate into buildings the positive biophilic features of our evolved relationship with nature and to avoid biophobic conditions. ... A truly biophilic building would extend the benefits to all spaces and all occupants throughout the day. ...

Context: With the move to the new swing space immanent, several GSA employees have approached me ... more Context: With the move to the new swing space immanent, several GSA employees have approached me to ask about research on the human impacts of having plants in the workplace. As an environmental psychologist, I have done extensive research on the relationship between people and the natural world and am also an editor of the award winning book, Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life (Wiley, 2008). The cumulative body of evidence from over a decade of research on the people-nature relationship provides an unequivocal answer: contact with vegetation, in a variety of circumstances, is highly beneficial to human health and well being. Emerging evidence also suggests that, in office settings, exposure to plants and views of vegetation reduces stress, restores attentional capacity, and improves performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. The evidence is summarized below.

Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Digital Health, 2017

Recent development of wearable sensor technologies have made it possible to capture concurrent da... more Recent development of wearable sensor technologies have made it possible to capture concurrent data streams for ambient environment and instantaneous physiological stress response at a fine granularity. Characterizing the delay in physiological stress response time to each environment stimulus is as important as capturing the magnitude of the effect. In this paper, we discuss and evaluate a new regularization-based statistical method to determine the ideal lagged effect of five environmental factors-carbon dioxide, temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure and noise levels on instantaneous stress response. Using this method, we infer that the first four environment variables have a cumulative lagged effect, of approximately 60 minutes, on stress response whereas noise level has an instantaneous effect on stress response. The proposed transformations to inputs result in models with better fit and predictive performance. This study not only informs the field of environment-wellbeing research about the cumulative lagged effects of the specified environmental factors, but also proposes a new method for determining optimal feature transformation in similar smart health studies.

Creating the Productive Workplace, 2006

We study discretized maximal operators associated to averaging over (neighborhoods of) squares in... more We study discretized maximal operators associated to averaging over (neighborhoods of) squares in the plane and, more generally, k-skeletons in R n. Although these operators are known not to be bounded on any L p , we obtain nearly sharp L p bounds for every small discretization scale. These results are motivated by, and partially extend, recent results of T. Keleti, D. Nagy and P. Shmerkin, and of R. Thornton, on sets that contain a scaled k-sekeleton of the unit cube with center in every point of R n .

Study Objective: This study examined office workstation types' impact on objective health-related... more Study Objective: This study examined office workstation types' impact on objective health-related metrics including stress, physical activity (PA), and sleep quality. We propose a sensor-based sleep quality index (SB-SQI) to fill a needed gap for objective sleep quality measurement over short time scales. Methods: We monitored 231 office workers using chest-worn sensors for 72 hours, yielding 11,736 hours of usable data from 163 participants (mean age 43.4, 56% women). SB-SQI was based on a validated algorithm estimating sleep-onset latency, total sleep time, and sleep efficiency, using the scoring method from the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). We examined the relationships between SB-SQI, office workstation type (open-bench seating, cubicle, and private office), work-hours stress (standard deviation of heart rate variability), and after-work PA (relative duration of moderate-to-vigorous activity). Results: The sensor-derived poor-sleep ratio of the private office workers was higher than with other office workstation types (81% vs. 66.1%, p = 0.023). PSQI revealed a similar but insignificant trend with a lower effect-size. Among good-sleepers, open-bench seating workers had 22% (p = 0.018) less stress during work hours than others. A significant association between work-hours stress and after-work hours PA (r = 0.331, p = 0.000) was observed irrespective of office workstation type, with the highest PA level observed for open-bench seating workers. Conclusions: Office workstation type had a significant impact on work-hours stress, affecting PA after work hours, which influenced sleep quality. SB-SQI could be more sensitive than PSQI in determining the impact of office workstation types on sleep quality. This study suggests benefits to sleep outcomes from open-bench seating via reducing stress during work hours leading to increased activity after work hours. In addition, we propose an innovative sensor-based sleep quality index (SB-SQI), which enables superior sensitivity in tracking sleep quality over short time scales compared to selfreported sleep quality for calculating relationships between office workstation types and sleep outcomes.

Lighting design for office buildings has focused largely on the amount of light for visibility, s... more Lighting design for office buildings has focused largely on the amount of light for visibility, strategies to reduce visual discomfort, and the use of daylight as a means to reduce energy in buildings. Little attention has been given to understanding how light affects occupants’ psychological and physiological systems, including circadian functions that regulate sleep, mood, and alertness. The specific goals of the present study were to: (1) perform photometric measurements at workstations in winter and late spring, and (2) analyze the impacts of personal light exposure on circadian entrainment using a wearable light and activity measurement device. Reported here are the results of the measurements performed during two seasons in a building located in the Northwest region of the United States.

Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, 2021

OBJECTIVE This study examined office workstation types' impact on the relationship between fa... more OBJECTIVE This study examined office workstation types' impact on the relationship between fatigue and three health metrics: physical activity, stress, and sleep quality. METHODS Data from 225 office workers were collected for perceived fatigue, perceived sleep quality (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index [PSQI]), physiological stress response (standard deviation of heart rate variability [HRV]), and physical activity (total activity in minutes) during three consecutive workdays. Stress and physical activity were measured using chest-worn sensors. Workers were then categorized as tired or not-tired based on the median of the fatigue rating. RESULTS Among tired workers, open-bench seating workers had increased physical activity, improved sleep quality, and reduced stress compared with workers in private offices and cubicles. CONCLUSIONS Office workstation types influence physical activity and levels of stress during work hours, which in turn affect sleep quality.

Lighting Research & Technology, 2019

It is well established that light affects both visual and non-visual systems. Laboratory studies ... more It is well established that light affects both visual and non-visual systems. Laboratory studies have shown that, depending upon the time of exposure, short-wavelength light of sufficient amount and exposure duration will either entrain or disrupt the synchrony between our biological clock and our local position on Earth. Laboratory studies have also shown that light across the entire visible spectrum can enhance alertness, both day and night. Scant attention has been given to testing the effects of light on building occupants’ non-visual responses, and, consequently, lighting specifiers have been offered little guidance on the design and application of lighting for non-visual effects. The present study helps to fill that gap through field-testing of light exposures from a novel luminaire designed to promote entrainment and alertness throughout the day in actual office environments. The data support the inference that light exposures, when properly applied, can promote circadian ent...

Indoor Air, 2019

This study offers a new perspective on the role of relative humidity in strategies to improve the... more This study offers a new perspective on the role of relative humidity in strategies to improve the health and wellbeing of office workers. A lack of studies of sufficient participant size and diversity relating relative humidity (RH) to measured health outcomes has been a driving factor in relaxing thermal comfort standards for RH and removing a lower limit for dry air. We examined the association between RH and objectively measured stress responses, physical activity (PA), and sleep quality. A diverse group of office workers (n = 134) from four well-functioning federal buildings wore chest-mounted heart rate variability monitors for three consecutive days, while at the same time, RH and temperature (T) were measured in their workplaces. Those who spent the majority of their time at the office in conditions of 30%-60% RH experienced 25% less stress at the office than those who spent the majority of their time in drier conditions. Further, a correlational study of our stress response suggests optimal values for RH may exist within an even narrower range around 45%. Finally, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Lighting Research & Technology, 2018

A field study was conducted at two U.S. federal government office sites and two U.S. embassies to... more A field study was conducted at two U.S. federal government office sites and two U.S. embassies to demonstrate whether circadian-effective lighting (providing circadian stimulus (CS) values of CS ≥ 0.3) could be installed in office buildings, and to determine whether this lighting intervention would reduce sleepiness and increase alertness, vitality and energy in office workers while at work. Desktop and/or overhead luminaires provided circadian-effective lighting at participants’ eyes during a two-day intervention. A pendant-mounted Daysimeter device was used to measure participant-specific CS values during the baseline and the intervention days. Participants also completed questionnaires inquiring about sleep habits, stress and subjective feelings of vitality and energy. The Daysimeter data showed that participants were exposed to significantly higher amounts of circadian-effective light while at work during the two intervention days compared to the baseline day. Self-reported slee...

Occupational and environmental medicine, Jan 20, 2018

Office environments have been causally linked to workplace-related illnesses and stress, yet litt... more Office environments have been causally linked to workplace-related illnesses and stress, yet little is known about how office workstation type is linked to objective metrics of physical activity and stress. We aimed to explore these associations among office workers in US federal office buildings. We conducted a wearable, sensor-based, observational study of 231 workers in four office buildings. Outcome variables included workers' physiological stress response, physical activity and perceived stress. Relationships between office workstation type and these variables were assessed using structural equation modelling. Workers in open bench seating were more active at the office than those in private offices and cubicles (open bench seating vs private office=225.52 mG (31.83% higher on average) (95% CI 136.57 to 314.46); open bench seating vs cubicle=185.13 mG (20.16% higher on average) (95% CI 66.53 to 303.72)). Furthermore, workers in open bench seating experienced lower perceived...