Designing for Populations of People Using Tools Describing More of their Dimensions

Human factors and ergonomics decisions are made on the basis of a population of users. To best accommodate anatomical variability in a population, we need to know how relevant landmarks (human and workstation) are related to each other in 3D space. Traditionally, we've relied on summary statistics of one-dimensional anatomical measures (e.g., 95th percentile eye height) of people in artificially constrained postures to create simplified representatives of a population. Today, 3D digital human models showing whole population distributions of anatomical landmarks in relation to a workspace enable us to make more informed decisions. Our presentation demonstrates using tools describing more dimensions of a population (i.e., a digital 3D human model and a multi-dimensional database of 3D anthropometry in a natural working posture, landmark motion paths, and demographic data) to make workspace design decisions.