Designing Movement Into the Workday
What helps or prevents working adults from spending time moving outdoors, and what role does outdoor movement play in their overall well-being?
This investigation began as collaborative coursework with four other students as part of Duke University's Human-Centered Design program. The research, synthesis, ideation, and concept development were collaborative. If the investigation later moves into independent work, that transition will be identified clearly.
Students in the course were divided into small groups working across different challenge areas. I was assigned to Health and Care Delivery and chose to remain in that group. That was my group's specific challenge area, not the theme of the course as a whole, and it became the starting context for this investigation.
Within Health and Care Delivery, the group generated several possible problems before choosing a direction. One early direction we pursued focused on encouraging people to walk outdoors, to support mood and reduce anxiety symptoms.
As we developed that direction, we deliberately broadened it from walking specifically to outdoor movement more generally — we didn't want to assume in advance that walking was the activity that mattered most, and wanted the research itself to leave room for participants' actual behavior to emerge.
Our attention then narrowed toward working adults. We were interested in the possibility that work itself — long periods indoors, sedentary routines, and expectations of availability — could make outdoor movement difficult to incorporate into everyday life.
What the Literature Suggested
Secondary research examined physical activity and depression, time in nature and well-being, outdoor nature-based activity and mental health, and everyday movement — particularly walking — in relation to physical-health outcomes. That literature helped establish that physical activity, outdoor time, and everyday movement were worth investigating further; it did not point toward a particular intervention.
Because the research pointed to both mental and physical health outcomes, and not to mental health alone, the group's framing broadened from mental well-being specifically to overall well-being. From here on, this account uses "well-being" in that broader sense.
Looking Underneath the Obvious Problem
The group used a Root Cause Analysis (the "5 Whys") and an Iceberg Model to look underneath the more visible complaints — asking what patterns, structures, or assumptions might sit beneath something like "working adults don't get enough movement during the day." That work led to a research plan, identifying what the group still needed to learn directly from working adults.
Asking Working Adults Directly
The group designed a survey — "Outdoor Movement in the Everyday Lives of Working Adults" — intentionally framed around outdoor movement rather than walking specifically, covering things like where and how people worked, how much of their day involved activity, whether and why they went outside, what got in the way, and how they felt before and after outdoor movement when it happened. The survey went through more than one version; questions were compressed and edited as the group refined what it actually needed to ask.
The group reviewed the responses together — approximately a dozen in total — and looked for recurring patterns, an exploratory read rather than formal coding. Walking came up repeatedly in how participants described outdoor movement: walking to clear their head, photographing plants, visiting a nature preserve, listening to a podcast while walking, and commuting. With a sample this small, we treated that recurrence as a direction worth exploring, not as a broad conclusion about working adults. It gave the group a practical reason to continue exploring walking as we moved into intervention design, and helped clarify how outdoor movement was already fitting into people's everyday lives.
That understanding converged into the question the group settled on:
What helps or prevents working adults from spending time moving outdoors, and what role does outdoor movement play in their overall well-being?
Framed as an open design opportunity, that became: How might we make it easier for working adults to incorporate outdoor movement into their daily routines? The research question describes what the group wanted to understand; the How Might We reframes it as something to design toward.
Even though walking had come up repeatedly in what the group heard, the design opportunity itself stayed broader than walking. Once the group had that opportunity rather than a settled answer, the next step was to generate options before narrowing to one. The group brainstormed broadly and deliberately before evaluating anything — ideas included walking meetings, protected outdoor breaks, timed walking routes, movement built into existing break tasks, outdoor workspaces, employer movement policies, calendar and workflow integration, gamification, and a few others.
To move from that list toward something worth developing further, the group used an Impact/Effort Matrix — the team's own assessment of each idea's potential impact relative to the effort it would take to pursue or implement it. Walking meetings, combined with calendar integration, landed in the high-impact, low-effort area of that matrix and was the idea the group chose to develop next — a decision based on the group's own judgment at the time, not proof that the idea would work.
The group developed that idea into a concept: calendar invitations that could identify a meeting as a good candidate for walking, and prompt participants with what to do before it (choosing a route, grabbing headphones) and during it (staying focused on the conversation, camera off). The group communicated this through a concept flyer and gathered early reactions to it — not to test whether it worked, but to see whether people understood it, found it relevant, could imagine using it, and to surface what concerns or open questions it raised.
Around this point, I designed an early calendar-interface prototype: a weekly calendar view containing a walking meeting, with guidance for what participants could do before and during it. I translated the group's walking-meeting concept into the interface, interaction, layout, and supporting prompts shown here.
The instructor responded positively to the prototype: he mentioned that he personally enjoys walking meetings and said he could imagine using something like it. That was encouraging early feedback — a sign the concept was understandable and something at least one person could imagine using — not evidence of effectiveness or broader demand.
Real questions were still open at the end of this stage: whether people would actually build something like this into their calendars, how the invitation itself should work in practice, and what additional information or support participants might need before trying it.
This stage was a rapid design-sprint exercise completed on a course timeline, with a small research sample and limited rounds of testing and iteration. It gave us enough to continue exploring the idea, not enough to determine whether it works.
After developing the first concept, I independently looked into whether tools supporting walking meetings already existed. I found Walking Meetings for Outlook, an existing tool built around a similar idea.
That discovery changes what the more interesting question is. Designing another tool may not be the central problem — something like this already exists. The question becomes closer to: if the tools already exist, why isn't this behavior more common in everyday work?
I don't have an answer to that yet. What I have is a set of plausible directions worth investigating, not findings — things like awareness of tools like these, workplace norms around meetings, what managers signal about time away from a screen, whether a given meeting is actually compatible with walking, expectations around video and being on camera, accessibility, weather and location, privacy, hybrid participation, organizational or IT restrictions, and how much autonomy people actually have over their own calendars. Every one of those is a hypothesis. None of it has been tested yet.
This investigation is still in progress. With two course sessions remaining, the next stage will include another iteration of the prototype and further testing. What we learn there may change the concept — or the question — again.