Christoph A. Johns

Christoph A. Johns

PhD in Human-Computer Interaction @ Aarhus University

Stitch - Office Wellbeing

Stitch - Office Wellbeing
Stitch is a health and safety monitoring app for balanced work environments for Siemens Real Estate.

Problem

From lighting conditions to temperature and air quality, there are many physical parameters that affect employee productivity and well-being in an office. These so-called environmental stressors usually account for differences in individual performance in the range of 2.4% to 5.8%—but it can be as much as 14.8% under especially unpleasant conditions. With the COVID-19 pandemic adding to this existing issue, safe and healthy work environments have become more important than ever. Monitoring the potentially harmful parameters at their workplace can, therefore, significantly support users in achieving their personal goals while keeping their health and safety in check.

Affinity Diagram
Several research methods were utilized to explore the problem space and to formulate a brief. Here, an excerpt of the affinity diagram summarizing many of the findings is displayed.

Solution

Our business solution is an interactive mobile app that acts as a health and safety monitoring service largely remaining in the background but which can provide extensive information about the work environment on-demand. Users can access and view current levels of physical parameters across offices and buildings, including historical trends and context. To give one example, the app contains a so-called “surroundings map” displaying live noise and light levels including their general location, giving the user a more spatial look into the noise or light environment at any given desk. To further support users’ in maintaining good health, the app provides local notification alerts and recommendations to, for example, take a break or switch to a more suitable work environment.

Hand-drawn and digital sketches
For exploration of the solution space, both hand-drawn as well as digital sketching techniques were used. Here, sketches of two stages in the sketching and prototyping stage are shown.

Business Model

As our service heavily relies on sensor data gathered by office space providers, our target customers are these office space providers while the users of our application are their customers, the office space users. Our main revenue stream is to incur a license fee from office space providers for the services we can provide to their customers. This income will primarily offset the research and development costs associated with the design and customisation of the necessary software based on user and customer requirements.

Solution
Several mockups and a Figma prototype were created and presented to the client Siemens Real Estate.

Delivery and Testing

The final prototype for our mobile application was tested with office workers accustomed to workplace booking systems and pitched to the client. The result of this project will be further used to inform design decisions around the development of the client’s internal workplace booking software.