In a world where we are campaigning for mental health awareness, creating sugar taxes to minimize the obesity crisis and lining the streets about climate change it is staggering that ergonomics and human factors, the very subject that impacts how humans interact with their environment is yet to be fully in the spotlight. The nuclear and aviation sectors for example have recognized the importance of minimizing risk from human error. In healthcare, ergonomics and human factors professionals are working in partnership with clinicians, managers and IT specialists to ensure a safe and resilient healthcare system. Whilst high hazard environments have taken notice of ergonomic strategies over the last few decades it is strange why more mainstream sectors haven't.
Ergonomics is really a story of interactions, communication or direct involvement with someone or something. How humans interact with each other, physical products and the different spaces they find themselves in is of great importance so that we can envision and create a better future. We are constantly trying to interpret the cues that we receive and the cues we send. If you think about it everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch in our everyday lives evokes an emotional or physical response and takes us in a certain direction depending on whether our experience is good or bad. We don’t tend to judge an experience only by how we deal with it, but also how others experience the product or environment. We start to build a story in our minds based on the body language we see others expressing.
The way ergonomics works is we see each product or environment as a system and if we change something, we want to understand what the outcome of that change is. When you change something, there is always a ripple effect. This can be good or bad and it is the job of an ergonomist to figure out the different avenues that one decision can take to help avoid design flaws that could affect the wellbeing and performance of people. A simple change in a complex system is always a complex intervention.
We really have three goals: we want to design issues out and reduce human error, we want to minimize any risk of injury to the human and ultimately, we want to boost performance of the human and the system. It isn’t just good enough to survive, that’s not what being human is about, we want to thrive in everything we do. The science of ergonomics captures many different disciplines, including, anthropometry (measurements of the human body), biomechanics (how the body moves), environmental physics, applied psychology and social psychology.
We’ve all experienced poor design and it most likely that you do every single day. You are trying to find your way in an airport and the signage is confusing or non-existent. You go to use a public bathroom and you can’t figure out how to flush the toilet, do you push a button, wave your hand or let it flush automatically. You go to open a door and it has a handle, so you pull it towards you but in fact you have to push it. You walk into a retail store to browse some new clothes but there is blaring music in the background and you can’t concentrate. You go to pay for your parking, but the machine is so poorly designed that it takes you a minute or two to figure out where to put your ticket, let alone how to pay. Your chair at work is giving you a bad back. Your desk is so high that when you raise your chair your feet can’t reach the floor, or you’re so tall that you can’t fit underneath the desk at all. There are 50 buttons on your remote control, but you only use the on and off button, volume and moving from channel to channel and maybe once in a blue moon that red button. You can’t open the lid on your yoghurt pot, so you leave it and forget to have breakfast. And god forbid you try and empty the vacuum cleaner, do you press a button, do you unclip it and when you do where is the dirt you’ve just vacuumed up going to fall?
If you’ve experienced any of the above, you know that a lack of ergonomic design can be terribly frustrating. Not only that but if you experience poor design multiple times a day, consider how that affects your emotions, your mood, how you interact with others, and how it affects you physically and the way you perform at work. Your stories should be heard and counted, so that we can start to see how we can make everyone’s experience better. We should be able to navigate this world safely, easily and with dignity and good ergonomic design can support this.
