Ergonomics in design and design in ergonomics: Issues and experiences in education.

BACKGROUND. Articulating design and ergonomics skills through education is a major challenge for both fields. Indeed, professional ergonomists are more and more deeply involved in design processes, and ergonomics education should train them in design skills. As courses in ergonomics education are often time-constrained, it is difficult to engage students in real-scale projects and to plunge them into design processes. Conversely, activity analysis and active involvement of users in design projects (through co-creation or co-design processes) are rarely convened in architecture and design curricula. OBJECTIVE. It is therefore necessary to develop effective and relevant pedagogical settings, enabling students of both fields to develop their abilities and equip them to take action in concrete design situations. METHODS. In this paper, we describe a large-scale pedagogical setting involving groups of students from different disciplines gathered around a real-scale design project (re-shaping the waiting room of a mental health centre). Ergonomics students’ main task is to analyse the needs and real activities of end-users; interior design students’ task is to produce the design project. This communication more precisely focuses on describing the ergonomics students’ fieldwork and the practical and pedagogical innovations put in place to help them face the various challenges encountered during the project. RESULTS Based on formal feedback from students, teachers and stakeholders, we address three main challenges (1) dealing with the temporal constraints of the intervention, (2) documenting and observing a sensitive situation and (3) involving end-users to put them at the core of the design process. For each challenge, we describe the issue at stake; the work conducted to deal with this issue and eventually the feedback collected from students, teachers and stakeholders. CONCLUSION. The paper concludes with an analysis of success and failure factors for such pedagogical settings. In particular, physical enquiry devices, co-creation processes and co-constructed pedagogical settings are reviewed and paths for further improvement are opened, thanks to the collected feedback.