Abstract
The introductory design course in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Ryerson University combines Human Factors (HF) and Design. Due to its unique character, we have developed custom courseware.In recent years the instructors have noticed four specific shortcomings in students’ abilities to incorporate HF into their designs. We are developing new courseware that focuses on embedding HF considerations into the requirements specification stage. The courseware incorporates a novel combination of Hierarchical Task Analysis (a well-known method) with Usage Scenarios (a method of Salustri’s invention, based on the work of Stone and Wood). We further alter the courseware in several other ways to minimize the amount of documentation that students need to provide, while still capturing their decision-making process well enough to allow appropriate assessments. A plan for implementing and assessing the proposed work is also presented.
Highlights
The authors’ work is grounded in the fact that human factors (HF) are rarely included at the early stages of product design engineering [2,3,6,8]
This paper introduces one such tool, HTA+US, that combines Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) [1,10] and flowchart-like Usage Scenario (US) diagrams
If the ideas proposed in this paper are successful, we should see a significant increase in quality of designs with respect to HF
Summary
The authors’ work is grounded in the fact that human factors (HF) are rarely included at the early stages of product design engineering [2,3,6,8]. Besides working with industry to embed HF in practice, we are investigating how to embed HF systematically and explicitly in design for mechanical engineering undergraduate students, so that they may help raise HF issues in practice (something rarely done today) once they enter the workforce. To this end, we are developing tools for team-based design projects that drive students to address HF explicitly. The following sections describe the course for which we are developing the tool, the problems it is intended to address, the overall structure of the tool, our plans to introduce it to students, and how we expect to assess it
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