Innovation and design approaches within prospective ergonomics

Abstract

In this conceptual article the topic of "Prospective Ergonomics" will be discussed within the context of innovation, design thinking and design processes & methods. Design thinking is essentially a human-centred innovation process that emphasises observation, collaboration, interpretation, visualisation of ideas, rapid concept prototyping and concurrent business analysis, which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy. The objective of this project is to develop a roadmap for innovation, involving consumers, designers and business people in an integrative process, which can be applied to product, service and business design. A theoretical structure comprising of Innovation perspectives (1), Worldviews supported by rationalist-historicist and empirical-idealistic dimensions (2) and Models of "design" reasoning (3) precedes the development and classification of existing methods as well as the introduction of new ones.

Systems Design Perspective of Healthcare Provision in Humanitarian Aid

“…In relation to the Multilevel Design model, the HFE approach to design medical equipment is mostly used with consideration for the Product-Service and Product-Technology levels since it generally focuses on adjusting product attributes to a determined environment, rather than taking more system levels into account (Edwards & Intelliject, 2000;Martin et al, 2012). Most of the knowledge used in the design process is strongly focused on user requirements and technology-user interface, or microergonomics, whereas macroergonomics (the knowledge about how technology implementation affects organizational and human issues) have not been fully explored (Carayon, 2003;Liem & Brangier, 2012). This means that, likewise the PSS concept, companies from the healthcare sector have not adopted knowledge from HFE to develop their business models.…”

“…and are not limited to support traditional incremental redesign of medical devices (Carayon, 2003;Hendrick, 2005;Liem & Brangier, 2012;Manzini & Vezzoli, 2002;Mont, 2002;). -Organizations use business logic to support effectiveness, market demand, sustainability and optimization (through innovating business models) (Ceschin, 2012;Gaziulusoy, 2011b;Mays, Racadio, & Gugerty, 2012).…”

Design in context of use: An experiment with a multi-view and multi-representation system for collaborative design

“…Indeed, they allow them to distance themselves from their way of apprehending the system since they no longer reason from their point of view but from that of the personas [34]. In the design process, they improve the generation of ideas which are more numerous, more original and more flexible than a condition without personas [7]. Personas are commonly used with scenarios to help designers think and act like end users.…”

“…In the early stages of design, stakeholders involved tend to propose a collaborative tool that is suited to the concurrent design style [5]. Finally, prospective ergonomics is nowadays a key factor in innovation, of prior importance in product design, lifecycle and especially in its use [6][7][8]. Thus, extracted motivations for this paper are:…”

Generating prospective scenarios of use in innovation projects

“…Prospective Ergonomics has been defined as "the part of ergonomics that attempts to anticipate human needs and activities so as to create new artefacts that will be useful and provide a positive user experience" (Robert & brangier, 2009(Robert & brangier, , 2012. It has been argued that the development of prospective ergonomics methods constitutes a major milestone for the discipline of ergonomics, and that this should allow ergonomics to respond more efficiently to the challenges of innovation design (Nelson, 2011;Liem & brangier, 2012).…”