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Office Space, Comfort, Efficiency, and Ergonomics |
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Designing a home office involves a lot of due diligence and research for the person who has opted for telecommuting versus freeway commuting. From a psychological angle, you are now a happy camper, because you have left that rat hole called an office cubicle for the comfort of your home office space. But there are three aspects that you need to consider on the way to home office nirvana --- comfort, efficiency, and ergonomics.
How do you design and create comfort? For one, it is much more than the cushy office chairs that you bought while setting up your home office. More than anything, comfort can be defined as one of the greatest aspects of your design's effectiveness. Comfort with all the mental aspects coupled with the human-machine interaction factor are the primary design concerns in my book. This is the aspect that is usually noted first and most frequently.
Immediate satisfaction results when the user experiences the comfort of how an item feels. If you don't like how it feels, you won't be inclined to touch it. If you're not inclined to touch it, you won't want to operate it or use it. Therefore, the item has been relegated into uselessness and you have wasted money on purchasing it. The quality of the design is always measured in terms of its utility factor. The designer of the product has but one goal. His only mission is to create products whose utility has been enhanced by innovation in the design techniques.
Where the human-machine interaction is an issue, the mental aspects of comfort comes with feedback. We all have notions about products that are preconceived. If it is to be considered a product of quality, then it needs to feel like it has been manufactured with quality materials. You are less likely to feel comfortable using an object that feels too frail and lightweight because you feel like you could damage it too easily. Your opinion of an object revolves around the durability, feel, look, and use of that object.
So what is efficiency? This is simply the act of making a task or using an object simpler to do. The reduction of required strength makes the process less physically taxing. The speed with which you complete a task is relative to the number of steps involved in the completion of that task. Finally, repairs are considered to be more efficient when the number of operating parts is reduced. All of these spell efficiency. Making something more intuitive or reducing the amount of training all equates to efficiency.
Finally, when you talk about ergonomics, you are basically talking about making things comfortable. This also has the tendency to breed efficiency, but when you think about it, just the opposite is true also. When you make something more efficient, it becomes more comfortable. In its simplest form, ergonomics can be translated to mean the science of work. It is the attempt to create a comfortable work environment that makes ergonomics so useful. |
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