Ergonomic Evaluation and Visualization in the Car Design Process

Industries strive to minimize their development costs, to shorten the time required for development and to increase the quality of the product. The paper summarizes three ergonomic evaluation methods developed for the automotive industry. The first method presents a manikin with a movement pattern similar to people. The second method is a tool to evaluate comfort that can be combined with a manikin. The third and last, is a methodology for eliciting user comments. Ergonomic evaluation methods and tests with a computer support and generate information that may lead to reduced product development cost. These kinds of tools are also suitably used in cross-functional project groups in order to visualize alternative designs, and evaluations in a participative process. Visualization of traffic, driver and eye-movements seems to open up the discussion and is a step to a more user-centered design process.