Abstract
Leading a research project on Product Design about children’s furniture, the aim is to create a better environment for children, adapting furniture to their physical and psychological needs, namely a high chair following child’s growth from 6 months up to 7 years of age. The goal is also to provide solutions, which may enable extended product life cycles, contributing to sustainability. Taking Ergonomics and Human Factors as a tool for the understanding of how children interact with furniture, this study searches for relations between 3 different approaches in an ergonomic level: an interview based study with pre-school children (direct users), along with drawing sessions; an interview based study with parents (indirect users); and an adaptability study with high chairs available in the market (case study). When comparing results and conclusions, these studies give a glance on how children are such a difficult target, highly subjective and prone to change. However, even if a relation between the results of the different approaches is sometimes narrow, is through the use of Ergonomics and Human Factors as one of the main tools in this design research project, that we can start to reach a better understanding of how can furniture be adapted to the child.
The original version of this chapter was revised: Acknowledgments section has been included. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96071-5_223
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23 September 2018
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the University of Lisbon (Universidade de Lisboa) and Lisbon’s School of Architecture (Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade de Lisboa) for the PhD Grant given to this design research project, as well as CIAUD (Centro de Investigação em Arquitectura, Urbanismo e Design) for the financial support in this study.
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Salvador, C. (2019). Adapting Furniture to the Child – Ergonomics as a Main Tool in a Design Project. In: Bagnara, S., Tartaglia, R., Albolino, S., Alexander, T., Fujita, Y. (eds) Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018). IEA 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 824. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96071-5_131
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