ERGONOMICS Introduction:

Ergonomics, the engineering science concerned with the physical and psychological relationship between machines and the people who use them. The ergonomicist takes an empirical approach to the study of human-machine interactions. The objective is to improve the efficiency of operation by taking into account a typical person's size, strength, speed, visual acuity, and physiological stresses, such as fatigue, speed of decision making, and demands on memory and perception. Applications range from the design of work areas (including office furniture, automobile interiors, and aircraft cockpits) to the disposition of switches and gauges on the control panels of machinery to determining the size, shape, and layout of keys on computer terminals and character height, color, and clarity on video displays. The field of ergonomics is also sometimes called human or human-factors engineering, engineering psychology, and biotechnology.

Importance and application:

Profession of designing machines, tools, and work environments to best accommodate human performance and behaviour. It aims to improve the practicality, efficiency, and safety of a person working with a single machine or device (e.g., using a telephone, driving a car, or operating a computer terminal). Taking the user into consideration has probably always been a part of tool design; for example, the scythe, one of the oldest and most efficient human implements, shows a remarkable degree of ergonomic engineering. The science of people-machine relationships. An ergonomically designed product implies that the device blends smoothly with a person's body or actions. Ergonomics emerged in response to the considerably increased complexity of technology and of the conditions under which technology is used in modern production, to the substantial changes that have taken place in human labor, and to the synthesis in labor of numerous work functions. The discipline developed by borrowing from psychology, industrial physiology and occupational hygiene, social psychology, anatomy, and several technical sciences.

Ergonomics The scientific and technological progress has greatly increased the price of equipment and the cost of human error in the control of integrated systems. When designing new equipment and modernizing existing equipment it is therefore particularly important to consider in advance, as fully as possible, the abilities and characteristics of the people who will use it. In dealing with such problems, it is necessary to coordinate recommendations made by psychologists, physiologists, and specialists in occupational hygiene and social psychology and to bring these recommendations together into a single system of requirements for a given type of human work activity. In ergonomic research man, the machine, and the environment are regarded as an integrated system. The main subject of ergonomic research is the man-machine system. Ergonomics studies the characteristics of man, the machine, and the environment that are manifested under specific conditions of interaction and works out methods for taking these characteristics, or factors, into account when modernizing and developing equipment and technology. In addition, it studies such questions as the proper distribution of functions between man and machine, the operation of man-machine systems, and the means of

determining criteria for optimizing such systems; the criteria developed take into account the abilities and traits of the working person or group. The methodological basis of ergonomics is the systems approach, which makes it possible to use, in different combinations, the methodologies of various sciences whose purviews overlap; it is within this area of common interest that qualitatively new problems in the study of man-machine systems emerge and are solved. Ergonomics, which draws on a group of sciences devoted to the study of man, has developed in close interaction with engineering psychology, cybernetics, systems engineering, operations research, and industrial design, as well as with the scientific organization of labor and labor protection. Ergonomics is closely associated with design aesthetics. Ergonomic problems are dealt with by teams of experts that may include, depending on the nature of the problem to be solved, psychologists, physiologists, hygienists, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, designers, architects, and engineers.

DESIGN AESTHETICS Introduction:

Design aesthetics; creative planning directed toward perfecting mans physical environment, which is created by the instruments of industrial production; the method used is to reduce to a single system the functional and compositional relationships between individual objects and groups of objects and the objects aesthetic and functional characteristics. Design aestheticsoften identified with design properis inseparable from the modern-day process of creating industrial products intended for mans direct use; its practice results from creative interaction between design engineers, technologists, and other specialists and is meant to facilitate a better appraisal of consumer needs and an increase in production efficiency. Under the conditions of socialism, design aesthetics contributes to the creation of a harmonious physical environment that will meet all of the growing material and spiritual needs of man.

Designers who practice design aesthetics make use of the results of research in various fields of science and technology and are familiar with modern industrial production and its engineering and economics.

Concept and application:

Design aesthetics is governed by the theory developed by industrial design and by data derived from economics, sociology, psychology, ergonomics, semiotics, and systems engineering. Its methodology consists of an analysisa study of the initial situation and construction of the planned object, functionalergonomic and design-production analysis, and compositional analysisand a synthesis, which includes a functional-ergonomic survey and work on the objects composition. The use of modeling at all development stages (with scale models or, frequently, full-size models) makes it possible to test and select the optimum variants of composition, color and line, and ergonomic design. Here, the model serves not as an illustration of the design but rather as a designing tool; continuously modified in the course of development, it eventually becomes the standard for the experimental model of the article. Specific to the methodology of design aesthetics is the consideration of the planned article as one element in the entire group of objects that surround man in a physical environment, all of which must meet utilitarian and aesthetic requirements as much as possible and increase the efficiency of mans activities. Systems that unite articles produced or used together are the most complicated objects of design aesthetics. In this instance the methodology of design includes such tasks as solving the problems of component diversity in the system (the range of items offered) and formulating the systems structure with the techniques of standardization and unitization.

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