27 May, 2014
Nearly every time we meet new people we are asked the question: what do ergonomists do?
It is the ergonomist’s role is to study all aspects of the working situation and to fit the job to the human’s attributes.
Ergonomists use information about people, for example, their size (height, weight etc.), their ability to handle information and make decisions, their ability to see and hear and their ability to work in extremes of temperature. An ergonomist studies the way that these things vary in a group of people.
With this information, the ergonomist, working with designers and engineers, ensures that a product or service will be able to be used comfortably, efficiently and safely.
This must be so not only for ‘average’ people, but also for the whole range of people who use the product – including perhaps, children, the elderly and the disabled.
An ergonomist can also assess existing products and services, showing where they fail to ‘fit’ the user (in every sense of the word) and suggesting how this fit may be improved.
