Ergonomics: How Your Computer Workstation Furniture Was Designed
Ergonomics is so commonplace in our society that it often goes undiscussed.
The process behind designing and putting in place practices and equipment to compliment the human body is ergonomics. The discipline is often employed in the workplace to optimize performance and improve employee morale. Also, products and furnishings in the home continue to benefit from the same practice. There are also many health benefits which can result from these considerations, mostly in preventing repetitive strain injuries. Another intention of ergonomics is to help us overcome limitations, especially helpful to people with disabilities.
The principles of ergonomics have been traced back as far as Ancient Greece, allegedly to the fifth century BC. Initially, the discipline likely focused on the refining of tool designs to better fit the human hand. Egyptian surgeons have been demonstrated to have arranged their tools in a manner that would streamline surgical use and increase. Frederick Winslow Taylor is credited with being the first to organize ergonomic thinking into a solid discipline to optimize the method by which a task can be accomplished. In one example from the nineteenth century, he found that reducing the weight of coal shovels allowed miners to triple the amount of coal shoveled.
Similar observations would greatly alter the way war was waged by the military. Of particular interest during the years of World War I was the new field of combat aviation. Common elements included presenting an intuitive set of controls and designs which would assist the pilots in dealing with negative effects imposed on the human body by the flight. Edwin Link had developed the first functioning flight simulator by the 1930s, inspired by ergonomics. With early research in military matters, ergonomics inspired a wide range of efficient vehicles and equipment to be used in World War II.
Soon after the war, other designers began to apply ergonomic thinking to a variety of other fields. The automobile industry, for instance, used these ideas to make vehicles safer and more efficient.
Perhaps the next largest impact on industry came with the dawn of the Information Age and the rise of the computer. With the development of the personal computer (PC), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) became a driver for the business. The PC led to a broad range of furniture and equipment to complement the device and the human user. This list included the mouse, built to fit the human hand, and computer workstation furniture, which better suited comfortable computer use for the human body. Business and government have made use of the same thinking in the design of their furnishings, in control room consoles and data center consoles, for example.
Full-time specialists in ergonomics, sometimes called user trial engineers, became the obvious result of its popularity in the workplace. These human factor specialists work to improve upon present designs and create new innovations to replace less productive or safe components of the workplace. This can include the specialists considering all elements in a specific environment, such as light, temperature and climate. New areas of interest for ergonomics continue to develop, including fields as diverse as psychology, engineering, aviation and technology.
Before Buying NOC Consoles, Consider These Options How Much Will it Cost to Buy Data Center and Control Room Furniture?
