Products that are designed by incorporating human factor guidelines tend to be more market successful than products that are not. Even though consideration of human factors into the product and workplaces improves human performance and safety, designers often neglect human factors or are unable to integrate it into the product design. One of the challenges in considering human factors and ergonomics early in the design process is the lack of theoretical and practical knowledge on how to build prototypes. Considering the limited resources available and tight schedules during product conceptualization phase, collecting human-product interactions data becomes challenging. Designers often puzzled about how to proceed due to the lack of comprehensive guidelines on how to build a prototype for ergonomic analysis. Designers use either a physical, computational, or mixed prototype for ergonomic assessment and data collection. However, each type of prototypes has its own merits and demerits. Further, the effectiveness of the prototypes depends on the type of ergonomic assessment and the level of human product interaction. Hence, a systematic prototyping framework is presented, and examples are shown to demonstrate its capability. The proposed prototyping framework can be used by designers who are not ergonomics or prototyping experts but willing to integrate ergonomics into the product during the design process. The prototyping framework helps designers to conceptualize prototyping strategies before the hands-on activity of building a prototype starts. The goal of the prototyping framework is to guide designers in the right direction so that resources and time can be used wisely during the early stages in design.

 

The prototyping framework is created by unifying the guidelines from prototyping literature and the guidelines from human factor engineering principles. It consists of two sections. The first section provides the theoretical guidelines based on the prototyping and human factor principles, and the second section provides a toolbox that has a recommendation of tools and technology to create the prototype. The theoretical section of the prototyping framework loosely resembles the House of Quality (HOQ) structure. The prototyping framework has two subsections, namely, prototyping categories and prototyping dimensions. The prototyping categories are similar to the customer requirement of HOQ as it is used to identify what is the objective of the prototype, type of ergonomic assessment to perform, level of human-product interaction, and the number of resources available. Designers can use the given ergonomic assessment problem to derive the prototyping categories.  Next, the prototyping dimensions, similar to the engineering specification of HOQ, is used to identify the configurations of the prototype. The prototyping dimensions consist of the type of prototype, level of fidelity, complexity, scale, and the number of iterations. Designers can select the correct prototyping dimensions based on the prototyping categories and based on the prototyping and human factor principles that are embedded in the prototyping framework. The second section of the prototyping framework is the prototyping toolbox which has three-axis: (1) type of prototype, (2) fidelity level, and (3) human-product interaction level. Designers can use their expertise and availability of resources to fill up the toolbox with tools. The theoretical guidelines will help the designer to navigate the toolbox and select the appropriate tools. The proposed prototyping framework will provide both the theoretical guidelines and practical tools to build the prototype that can be used to integrate human factors into the product during the early design process.

 

The efficacy of the prototyping framework is demonstrated by a case study focusing on ergonomics of a civilian cockpit during a fire emergency. The prototyping framework is employed to develop the correct prototyping strategies that can be used for the ergonomic assessment of the pilot's performance during the emergency situation. Additionally, a cost-benefit analysis of the prototyping strategies is performed by measuring the information gained from a prototype over the resources spend to build it. The cost-benefit analysis will allow the designer to compare among multiple prototyping strategies and select the one which holds the most value.


A Conceptual Prototyping Framework for Integrating Human Factors Early in Product Design

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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