Response to Human Body, Ergonomics and Space
Name:
Instructor:
Response to Human Body, Ergonomics and Space
The reading ‘Joe and Josephine’ makes excellent use of personalization and imagery throughout the text. The issue of ergonomic in human engineering is often complicated and full of jargon but I had an easy time understanding the explanations that was accompanied by illustrations. These illustrations struck me as being highly detailed but still very accurate. A particular diagram illustrated the detailed human measurements in both men and women with considerable ease. The structure of the reading was fairly progressive and simple enough to be understood. The author moved through all the elements that affected human lifestyle such as color, sound and odor (Dreyfuss, 2003). It was interesting to discover that human beings are unaware of the consequences of different aspects of their environment. While posture and positioning were more obvious, I also realized that other elements such as color can also determine an individual’s attitude. Granz concentrated more on ergonomics and its impact on the health of an individual. Maintaining a good posture constantly is a difficult task to achieve and the effort to do so require medical and professional reasons that can give an individual the motivation. While people assume that their sitting posture is wrong, from the reading it was evident that most chairs were designed wrongly. By being supported by chair backs constantly, Granz proposed that it was impossible for people to lean how to sit uprightly (Cranz, 1998). I found this proposal intriguing since this is the main function of the chair back. However, his argument created awareness within me to concentrate on changing the seating posture of my colleagues. In fact, the human resource management in the office would benefit greatly from this information as it would reduce cases of employees with back aches and complications.
References
Cranz, G. (1998). The chair: Rethinking culture, body, and design. New York: W.W. Norton.
Dreyfuss, H. (2003). Designing for people. New York: Allworth Press.