Office Workers! This Is How You Will Look In 20 Years

Spending a long time sitting at a desk can badly affect our health. However, if in 20 years, office workers do look like this life-size model, the future doesn’t seem so bright.

She was called Emma by her creators. Emma’s appearance isn’t really appealing. Her eyes look dry and red from staring at a computer screen for hours. Her hunched back makes her look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. She has all the alarming symptoms including swollen limbs, excess weight, and eczema caused by stress. Fortunately, Emma is only a life-size doll from a team of researchers with behavioral futurist William Higham as the leader. But if we won’t do something to the office culture and environment, there’s no doubt that our world will be full of Emmas.

Higham said in an interview that we would become Emmas if we don’t radically change our working lives like moving more, having the right posture, taking regular breaks or improving our workstation setup.

Emma, as well as her symptoms, are not something that was made up by the researcher as they did a survey with over 3,000 office workers in the UK, Germany, and France. Out of all participants, 50% complained that their eyes were strained, 49% had sore backs, 48% had headaches while 45% had numb necks. From this data, a model was created by Higham and his colleagues. The model describes the look of an average worker in 20 years if radical changes aren’t made to the workspace.

Emma is a life-size model showing the negative effects the current workstation can have on office workers, visually and physically. And unfortunately, it is going to take only 20 years for Emma to become a grim reality.