The consideration of human factors in product design at the engineering programmes of a Brazilian university

ABSTRACT

Human factors/ergonomics (HFE) can make great contributions to product design (PD). This paper presents a cross-sectional study conducted at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), located in Florianopolis, SC, Brazil, with the students of the engineering department in order to assess their understanding of HFE and its use by students in PD. The results showed that 70.3% of students do not apply HFE in PD and it has no correlation with the fact of taking an HFE class or with the PD methodologies they use. Because of that, it presented an analysis of the approach of HFE in the PD methodologies known by the students, clarifying that these methodologies do not provide proper support for the HFE application.

KEYWORDS:

• Human factors
• product design
• engineering design
• design methodology
• design education

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Engineering Department from Federal University of Santa Catarina and the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education – CAPES.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [grant number 1359649].