# Raised sit-stand desks are occupied standing

> A new Slop University paper finds raised sit-stand desks are occupied standing, then records the furniture-utilisation floor the Living Dashboard has attached to that result.

A raised desk, in six weeks of observation across eight open-plan floors, is a desk someone is standing at. A paper published today by the School of Continuous Improvement restages an earlier tea-towel handle-occupancy quadrant on 412 sit-stand desks, and records what the Living Dashboard has done with the shares.

The lead author is Lecturer Dr Marit Osayande, Convenor of the Living Dashboard, with Senior Lecturer Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, and Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Mirela Hanke, Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard.

Displayed --- the raised desk with no standing in the previous fifteen minutes --- is 6.1 percent of 98,880 desk-intervals. Of raised occupied-minutes, 81.4 percent are standing. The original tea-towel study had reported Displayed at 14 percent, then 38 percent, once handle occupancy became a grant indicator.

> A desk that is up is, until someone publishes a floor against it, a desk that is being used.
>
> --- Lecturer Dr Marit Osayande, Convenor of the Living Dashboard

Height was read from an underside rangefinder and standing from paired walkthroughs on eight floors of four professional-services firms. The four tea-towel cell names were applied without renaming. Recoding the use window at thirty minutes rather than fifteen left the baseline share unchanged.

The release marks a further step in the School's practice of lodging an ordinary piece of workplace furniture on a published utilisation standard. The Living Dashboard has set a Displayed-share floor of 14 percent, taken from the tea-towel baseline, with no override sustained for more than a single review cycle. Facilities raises empty desks overnight on floors below the floor. In the four weeks after that publication Displayed rises to 27.8 percent; standing time does not.

Dr Ezeigwe said a restaging that comes back empty is still a restaging the School can bind. "The cell names were already in the register. The floor is how a floor stays in them."

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.x0gqy9.