Guerilla Ergonomics: Perceiving the Affordances for Workplace Design

Abstract

A successful ergonomic intervention involves creating affordances that support safe, effective, productive and comfortable working conditions. Guerilla ergonomics entails creating the requisite affordances using objects that are readily available in the workplace. This often means using objects in ways not intended in their original design. As such this has the advantage of creating viable working conditions quickly and cheaply. Workers learn how to adapt quickly to new problems or changes in the work environment. Our research has shown that the perception of the affordance for an object’s intended use can interfere with a person’s ability to see other uses for the object. Practice in perceiving new uses for objects as well as compiling a directory of possible solutions may help overcome these limitations.KeywordsAffordanceworkplace ergonomicsergonomic intervention