NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Brian Peacock from PRODUCT DESIGN
MR. ALEXANDER: Our next moderator will be Brian Peacock from General Motors, who will be talking about the Product Design Breakout.
DR. PEACOCK: I was asked by Jim McGlothlin from NIOSH to talk about product design. On the panel with myself -- I'm from General Motors -- was Rob Radwin from the University of Wisconsin, and Bill Marras from Ohio State University.
First of all I'm going to let you have Bill Marras' major points. He stated that product design in manufacturing process is more than common sense. Bill's next point was that quantitative tools are necessary for bench marking the manufacturing design. Bill mostly focuses on the analysis phase of the design cycle using quantitative analysis tools. We can all use Boggs scales for saying how much does it hurt and where does it hurt, but we feel that we need more quantitative tools, such as the lumbar motion monitor and electromyography and better predictive models.
It was argued that these quantitative measures often result in unexpected findings that lead to optimal design.
Another point that Bill made was that quantitative measures are even more important when there is a high cost of being wrong in the design process.
I followed Bill and discussed the engineering design process. An important thing to realize in the design process of something that's going to happen three, four, five years out, is that we, the ergonomists, don't own the process, the engineers do. So our job is not to impose our process on them, but to infiltrate their processes.
The next thing that I discussed was the level of analysis, that is, the level of quantification should somehow reflect the importance of the cost of being wrong in the analysis cycle.
I also emphasized that engineers need quantitative rules. It's no good telling them that it's a 5 on a Boggs scale or a 15 or whatever it is; they need to know something about 10 pounds or 50 pounds or 8 Newtons or 15 inches or something like that. Engineers need numbers; we need to communicate in their language.
The other point that I discussed was that often, in the design process, we use a surrogate for the operator. This may be an anthropometric table an anthropomorphic computer model, it may be the NIOSH lift equation or the Snook tables -- we don't necessarily have an operator there to analyze.
I also would like to address some of the constraints on the decisions that are made. Generally speaking, policy decisions are made by management, not by engineers; and they have to decide which population to accommodate, whether we accommodate 50 percent or 75 percent or 95 percent of the population. What are the constraints in terms of time to implement a suggested design, and the resources available to implement these designs. All ergonomics decisions or engineering design decisions have to be dealt with in the context of the constraints of those decisions.
Rob Radwin discussed some of the mechanisms of increasing the level of sophistication of this design cycle by interaction between universities and industry, given that there is less government sponsorship of research now. He also suggested that he wanted to remove the ivory tower image of universities and get involved. The advantages of university involvement with industry is the level of expertise that exists within universities; there's an infinite supply of graduate students to do these jobs. They constitute enormous resources in terms of time, knowledge, and facilities, and you have an intelligent and enthusiastic cohort of people to help industry in this design process.
Often industry understands the problem but does not have the time for in-depth studies, and this is where universities can help. Rob has developed two consortia, one for hand tools and fastening in which 12 companies take part, a little bit from a lot of companies helps these kind of consortia.
There are of course problems of publication and proprietary nature of information, but these usually can be overcome. I think Bill and Rob and I all agreed that the solution to ergonomics problems in the long run is to educate the engineers, to put ergonomics in the engineering and the business curriculum. Generally speaking the engineers cause the problems and they are the people that have got to solve the problems. Thank you.
MR. ALEXANDER: Notice how we're starting to get our plugs wrapped on top of plugs up here. Now we're training engineers, so we're getting all these things coming together.
