The point in Mix magazine

Ergonomics is a waste of time

We do love new Mix columnists. Here we welcome a fascinating series of articles by the one with pointy beard, Chris Carpenter MD of Stills, branding specialist and long term furniture geek. Enjoy.

1. Ergonomics is a waste of time. You may think this a bold statement but I’ll start this series as I mean to go on.

Ergonomics is vital to the well being of everyone who sits at a chair, works at a desk or trawls the web. At the moment the discipline is also pretty much pointless. The problem is that 95% of all the really good work by designers and manufacturers to bring products with good ergonomics to market, is wasted. And most of the research, time and expertise put into the product development is lost. All because the person who all this effort is focussed on, the end user, has little or no instruction on how to set up their workspace and certainly has no understanding of how important it is to sit properly.

It is almost impossible for the manufacturer, dealer or specifier to properly educate the end user of the chair, although of course they need to provide all the necessary instructions on how to use their product correctly. The employer also has responsibilities to train their staff through H&S legislation and a duty of care to their employees. Risk assessments of individual workspaces are a legal requirement and should be an opportunity to find out individual users needs and a chance to engage them in the process of understanding how to use their equipment. Sadly they rarely teach them the real benefits of sitting properly. Without this understanding all this will have a limited effect and more then likely they will fall back into bad habits soon after the training is over.

None of the fundamentals of ergonomics is new, Bernadino Ramazzi (the father of occupational health) tried to bring it to our attention as early as the 1800s when he wrote:

“Yet ’tis certain that in each City and Town, vast Numbers of Persons still earn their Bread by writing. The Diseases of Persons incident to this Craft arise from three Causes; first, constant Sitting; secondly, the perpetual Motion of the Hand in the same manner; and, thirdly, the Attention and Application of the Mind.

Now ’tis certain that constant sitting produces Obstructions of the Viscera, especially of the Liver and Spleen, Crudities of the Stomach, a Torper of the Leggs, a languid Motion of the refluent Blood and Cacbexies. In a word, Writers are depriv’d of all the Advantages arising from moderate and salutary Exercise.

Constant writing also considerably fatigues the Hand and whole Arm, on account of the continual and almost tense Tension of the Muscles and Tendons.”

Today we are leading more sedentary lives, working longer hours and working with technology that is causing more Muscular Skeletal Disorders (MSDs). These in turn create fatigue, stress and pain leading to many lost hours at work.

In fact MSDs cause 53% of work-related injuries and 5.4 million lost days of work every year, with back pain following closely behind. So we can see that there is a tremendous loss to the economy and to the health of society. A really good way for the LibDemCon to reduce the deficit and increase the feelgood factor would be to improve people’s workspaces through the application of simple ergonomics. Improving the fit between people and the equipment they use, the work they do and their environment would improve well-being and increase productivity.

Our society needs a shift of emphasis to enable behavioural change. The governments 5-a-day campaign has helped us appreciate the importance of healthy eating. How about a government campaign for looking after your posture. It is crucial that we start by teaching children the habits that will stay with them for life.

As we are growing up we are totally unaware of how important posture is and as a society we pay no real attention to the individual needs of children at school. They spend a great deal of time on cheap, poor imitations of Robin Day’s classic, most of which are completely the wrong size. We need a radical approach that puts the needs of the individual first, especially young people with growing bodies who we expect to develop into fully functioning, happy adults.
Increasingly ergonomics is being driven by the use of technology.

And even at an early age when children are introduced to the computer they are given no teaching on how to interact with them. In Scandinavia, many children have a properly adjustable workstation. They are taught how to use it and crucially, they stay there for the day and it is only the teachers who move from classroom to classroom. Genius! So your child and their 30 friends get to sit properly at their own ergonomic workstation and they don’t have to damage their backs further by lugging heavy books around school and then take them home again in ill-fitting backpacks. Now that is what I call ergonomics in action, fitting the environment and the tools to the needs of the individual.

So the challenge for our society as a whole, not just our industry, is to change attitudes and make good posture and movement part of our daily lives. And we need to start with our children because if we succeed we will grow a happier society and save money at the same time.

Are you sitting comfortably?