A participant-observer study of ergonomics in engineering design: how constraints drive design process.

Too often, ergonomics is relegated to being a "post-design" evaluation, leaving ergonomists little opportunity to make significant and important design changes. One way to start attacking this problem is to study the process of design and, in particular, ergonomics in design. This article describes the findings from a four-month long participant-observer study of the relationship between ergonomics and engineering design. The study was conducted in the context of a large, interdisciplinary project consisting of design of a control room for a nuclear power plant. It was observed that designers and ergonomists must negotiate through a changing web of constraints from many sources. The impact that these constraints had on the course of the design was documented. A model is developed based on the abstraction hierarchy (Rasmussen, 1985, IEEE Trans. Systems Man Cybernet. SMC-15, 234-243; 1990, Int. J. Ind. Ergon. 5, 5-16) which shows the interaction of conflicting goals as ergonomists and other designers attempt to solve a complex design problem. This model leads to several insights: (1) locally optimal ergonomic designs may not be globally optimal, (2) ergonomists can improve their solutions by understanding the goals of other designers, and (3) future tools to aid ergonomists must be compatible with the constraint-rich environments in which they work.

[1]  C M Haslegrave,et al.  Integrating ergonomics and engineering in the technical design process. , 1994, Applied ergonomics.

[2]  Kenneth R. Boff,et al.  The human factors of system design: Understanding and enhancing the role of human factors engineering , 1991 .

[3]  Gary Klein,et al.  Design Engineers and the Design Process: Decision Strategies and Human Factors Literature , 1986 .

[4]  T. Green,et al.  The Tower of Babel Revisited , 1990 .

[5]  Donald A. Schön.  Designing: Rules, types and worlds , 1988 .

[6]  Louis L. Bucciarelli,et al.  An ethnographic perspective on engineering design , 1988 .

[7]  Jens Rasmussen,et al.  A model for the design of computer integrated manufacturing systems: Identification of information requirements of decision makers , 1990 .

[8]  Catherine M. Burns,et al.  A framework for describing and understanding interdisciplinary interactions in design , 1995, Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems.

[9]  William J. Cody,et al.  On the Design of Man-machine Systems: Principles, Practices, and Prospects , 1987 .

[10]  Jacob Buur,et al.  The Design Explorer Project: Using a Cognitive Framework to Support Knowledge Exploration , 1997 .

[11]  John S. Gero,et al.  Expanding design spaces through new design variables , 1993 .

[12]  S. Robbins.  Organization theory: Structure, design, and applications , 1987 .

[13]  D Meister,et al.  The Utilization of Human Factors Information by Designers , 1967, Human factors.

[14]  Vinod Goel,et al.  The Structure of Design Problem Spaces , 1992, Cogn. Sci..

[15]  Mark D. Gross,et al.  Constraints: Knowledge representation in design , 1988 .

[16]  Mary A. Meyer,et al.  How to apply the anthropological technique of participant observation to knowledge acquisition for expert systems , 1992, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..

[17]  Jens Rasmussen,et al.  The role of hierarchical knowledge representation in decisionmaking and system management , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.