We know you’ll all be woefully disappointed to hear this, but the simple truth is that Increo does not have HermanMiller Embody chairs for its employees.

Then again, we’re also not the types to spend fourteen hours straight sitting down; there’s enough action in the office that we’ll be moving around enough to stay healthy.

In fact, while having the world’s most comfortable chair would certainly be enjoyable, we took a different tack: what was the best, most ergonomic setup we could create for six employees for less than the cost of one Embody chair?

Step 1: Desk placement

The main building at the Increo Campus has a floor plan something like this:

where the large rectangle is a single room and each of the smaller rectangles is a desk. The three gray rectangles are the doors to the room. Not only does this surprisingly skewed design maximize traffic flow, it has several distinct ergonomic and functional advantages.

• Nobody is looking at a wall.

  Looking at walls prevents you from relaxing your eyes by periodically refocusing on a distant object. It also inhibits verbal communication; while this may or may not be a good thing, having to physically move to talk to someone has significant implications for productivity.

• No desk is parallel to a window.

  The strange angles give us a great compromise between putting everybody together and reducing glare from the windows next to the door on the bottom wall.

• All four walls are still accessible.

  Whiteboards. Silicon Valley loves them, because they’re critical to forming ideas. While the construction of our space doesn’t allow for whiteboards on all four walls, we have them on two and may put them on three eventually. Being able to use them without having to run in to desks is incredibly fortunate for us.

Step 2: Lighting

Like most offices in America, Increo’s office has harsh overhead fluorescent lighting, designed in the 1960s to meet the needs of people pushing paper all day long. This was great in the 1960s, when the primary mode of work of America’s office workers was pushing paper. Today, though, the average office worker spends most of his or her time using a computer and its light-emitting screen, making the overhead light level entirely too much.

Pro tip: turn off your overhead office lights!

Having no light, though, makes it too dark; now you have a huge light level contrast between the monitor and the rest of the office, which creates more eye strain than it solves.

Using our walls for whiteboards prevents us from lighting the perimeter of the office, so we decided instead to put floor lamps in the corners and a task lamp on each desk. IKEA has a store just down the street, so we ended up with this “ANTIFONI” number:

It has a halogen bulb (low energy use and good light spectrum at the same time!), it adjusts to really any angle, and the construction feels so much more solid than the standard flimsy Anglepoise rip-off.

Between lighting and clever layout, the Increo office is pretty people-friendly. As we grow, we may have more opportunities to implement some classic suggestions about work environment, but for now, we have a highly functional one that allows us to concentrate without wearing ourselves out every day.