Materiales de apoyo y recursos necesarios

Meister and Farr (1967) found that the designers in their study appeared to have little or no interest in utilisation of ergonomics information, and seldom even thought of

answers to specific questions and were not interested in trying to extract these from the general guidelines given in the handbooks. Another reason was that they disliked the 'wordiness' of such handbooks; they strongly prefer information in pictorial or graphical form. This lack of familiarity indicates a need to inform designers of what information is readily available, and to develop information sources that encourage designers to explore and grow familiar with the ergonomics information space (Burns et al., 1997).

Simpson and Mason (1983) remark that there is a lack of ergonomics guidelines that are directly applicable in design. A survey by Woodcock and Galer Flyte (1998)

indicates the same and found that 60% of the responding automotive designers and engineers did not think their need for ergonomics information was being met. Designers stress that information needs to be in a relevant, concise and usable format, and they also request more graphics in ergonomics references. The latter complaint is connected to the fact that design essentially is a visual activity, and knowledge or data expressed in a graphical format has a subtlety of meaning that cannot be found in a completely textual representation. MacDonald and Jordan (1998) believe that, if ergonomics is to get its message across to the design community, it is essential that it embraces a more visually- oriented approach to communication. One way to achieve this would be to ensure ergonomists had more training in envisioning information and qualitative value judgement during their education.

Burns and Vicente (1994) argue that it is not surprising that in today's competitive and constrained design environments designers may not be accessing ergonomics information. Typically, designers must quickly deal with a rich set of interacting issues that cross many disciplinary boundaries (Rouse and Boff, 1998). This involves accessing and using a wide variety of information sources such as the current state of the design, customers' requirements, past designs, available design components, potential new technologies, failed ideas and, of course, designers' own ideas. This information processing is carried out under tough time constraints. Rouse and Boff (1998) remark that designers must manage all this information in the process of trying to resolve design issues in a few days or couple of weeks at most, which means that there is little time for deeper studies. This puts pressure on ergonomics information to be easily accessible and relevant for current design matters. As discussed, this is a problematic area. For example, if detailed information is required by the design team in order to improve the ergonomics of a product, this request may be impossible to accomplish due to time constraints, if not planned for in advance. This puts emphasise on planning the search for ergonomics

information, including interpretation and communication of the ergonomics information to designers. This is especially important for generating so-called primary data, i.e. new information currently not available in a collected form suitable for the specific present purpose, since the search activity may take a long time. Existing information, secondary data, is quicker and cheaper to obtain, but is likely to require time spent on interpretation and validation since the data may be drawn from another context or be more general than ideal for the current design matter. Regarding obtaining primary data, Porter et al. (1993) highlight that detailed information of current designs from user questionnaires and user trials, or of new designs using mock-ups with selected subjects, can take weeks or, more usually months, to acquire.

According to (Meister, 1982), designers are reluctant to accept an input unless the benefits resulting from that input are immediately obvious. This may cause problems in making designers pay attention to ergonomics since it benefits the future use of the product. These benefits may be invisible to the designer since they do not do things to the product directly. Fulton Suri and Marsh (2000) feel that designers are sometimes

frustrated by the results from ergonomics analysis as they provide data about peoples' capabilities and their reactions to specific design variables, but generally do not, by themselves, lead to design solutions.

Eason and Harker (1991) argue that it is not sufficient for the ergonomics

community to undertake research and generate new primary sources of relevant findings, as it is also necessary to put considerable effort into developing appropriate methods of delivering this information where it is needed. Chapanis (1995) maintains that it is ergonomists', not designers' or engineers', responsibility to translate ergonomics

information into project specific design recommendations, i.e. that ergonomists should be the experts in interpreting ergonomics information, e.g. as presented in guidelines, into relevant design information, and to support the employment of the data. This is a challenge since ergonomists have an inclination to point out drawbacks of designs from an ergonomics point of view, but often have difficulty in providing guidance of how something should be designed, e.g. of answering questions such as: "how could I change the design to improve it?" (Rouse and Boff, 1998).

Haslegrave and Holms (1994) remark that even the ergonomists themselves found that the guidance given by handbooks was often inapplicable to their own design questions. The authors give the example of design guidelines for the layout for instrument panels (e.g. placements of controls and displays) coming from process

industries (e.g. power plant control rooms) not being relevant for the design of a vehicle instrument panel.

To improve the transfer of ergonomics information to designers, ergonomics researchers and intermediaries are faced with two challenges: to reduce the perceived costs of obtaining ergonomics information and, more important, the provision of information which is of high value and matches the needs of designers (Burns and Vicente, 1994). Eason and Harker (1991) comment that the main dilemma in providing an effective ergonomics contribution appears to be the conflict between providing valid inputs and providing usable ones. To be valid the contribution typically has to reflect the specific considerations of task, user, application and technology. However, to be usable to most designers the contribution needs to be simple to understand and to execute.