BODYSPACE

• Several similar contests with the petty tyrants and marauders of the country followed, in all of which Theseus was victorious. One of these was called Procrustes or the stretcher. He had an iron bedstead on which he used to tie all travellers who fell into his hands. If they were shorter than the bed he stretched their limbs to make them fit; if they were longer than the bed he lopped off a portion. Theseus served him as he had served others.
• Prior to her injury, 'Janice' worked as a word processor operator, for a medium-sized firm of management consultants just outside London. She worked in a typing pool with three other girls.
• One day, one of the partners in the firm needed to get a lot of information entered onto a database in a hurry—and it occurred to him that Janice might work faster if she was in a room on her own where she could not waste time chattering with her friends. So he had a computer terminal set up for her in the firm's library.
• It was placed on an antique wooden desk. This was somewhat higher than the standard office desk (antiques often are). It had two plinths and a 'kneehole drawer' in the space between them where the user sits.
• Janice found that however she sat at this desk she could not get into a comfortable working position. She noticed in particular that her wrists were not at their normal angle to the keyboard.
• It was during the early part of the afternoon that she first began to be aware of a dull ache at the backs of her wrists. This rapidly became worse until she was in considerable discomfort.
• So she told her boss about it. His response (as it was subsequently alleged) was to say: 'Stop whingeing and get on with your work!'
• So Janice did. As a result, she developed an acute tenosynovitis affecting the extensor tendons of
• Janice was set up with a computer terminal in the firm's library on an antique wooden desk that was higher than a standard office desk
• Janice found that however she sat at this desk she could not get into a comfortable working position, and her wrists were not at their normal angle to the keyboard
• Janice developed an acute tenosynovitis affecting the extensor tendons of both wrists, which became chronic and prevented her from typing
• Janice lost her job and was forced to take up less well paid employment as a traffic warden
• Janice took legal action against her employers who eventually settled 'on the courtroom steps' for a substantial sum of money
• Mismatch between the demands of the working task and the capacity of the muscles and tendons


  Resulted in excessive stresses on Janice's body structures
• Mismatch between the dimensions and characteristics of the workstation and those of its user

  Caused Janice's injury
• Musculoskeletal injuries at work are reaching epidemic proportions in many parts of the world
• Most of the visible and tangible characteristics of the artificial environments in which we spend the greater part of our lives are the consequences of design decisions
• Artefacts that we encounter in our human-made environment are often like Procrustean beds to which we must adapt
• Ergonomics


  The science of work: of the people who do it and the ways it is done; the tools and equipment they use, the places they work in, and the psychosocial aspects of the working situation
• The word 'ergonomics' was coined by Professor Hywell Murrell in 1949 at a meeting of a working party
• Work


  Any planned or purposeful human activity, particularly if it involves a degree of skill or effort
• Ergonomics is concerned with the design of tools and artifacts and environments for human use in general
• User-centred design


  If an object, a system or an environment is intended for human use, then its design should be based upon the physical and mental characteristics of its human users
• Criteria for a successful match between product and user

  • Functional efficiency
  • Ease of use
  • Comfort
  • Health and safety
  • Quality of working life
• There can be conflicts between these criteria, but ergonomists argue that this problem is not as big as it seems
• The Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Company case illustrates how cost-benefit trade-offs with implications for health and safety are a fact of everyday industrial life
• Ergonomics sits on the boundary between empirical science and ethical values
• Anthropometry


  The branch of the human sciences that deals with body measurements: particularly with measurements of body size, shape, strength and working capacity
• Anthropometry is a very important branch of ergonomics
• The idea of 'designing to the human scale' in classical architecture is closely linked historically to the various 'canons of human proportion' employed by artists and sculptors since ancient times
• The most detailed system of human proportions from classical times is that of the Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius
• Leonardo da Vinci's 'Vitruvian Man' drawing is bound up with the theory of the 'golden proportion' or 'golden ratio'
• Dürer's Four Books of Human Proportions may be regarded as the beginnings of modern scientific anthropometry
• The entire affair was acquiring distinctly metaphysical overtones. It is these overtones that are invoked perhaps in the expression 'designing to the human scale'. If the phrase has any more pragmatic meaning I have been unable to discern it.
• Leonardo (1452–1519) and his younger contemporary Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)


  Stood on the watershed between modern empiricism and the earlier classical tradition, with Leonardo looking backwards and Dürer looking forwards
• Classical tradition


  • It was prescriptive, dealing with idealized human beings as they ought to be according to some pre-existing aesthetic or metaphysical principle, rather than real human beings as they actually are
• Dürer's Four Books of Human Proportions

  The beginnings of modern scientific anthropometry, where Dürer attempts to categorize and catalogue the diversity of human physical types based on systematic observation and measurement
• The classical tradition briefly reasserted itself in the middle years of this century in the work of the celebrated French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965)
• Le Corbusier's The Modular: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics


  An obscure work thought by many to be profound
• Le Corbusier said: 'A house is a machine for living in', and thus became one of the patron saints of the school of design known as 'functionalism'