Consumer ergonomics is essentially concerned with design as it affects the general public, and this can relate to goods and services, buildings or other environments. People should be able to carry out their daily life activities easily, efficiently and safely, whether they are young or old, fit or disabled, healthy or ill. But consumers use a wide range of goods and services and themselves vary widely in their anatomical, physiological and psychological characteristics which makes them hard to classify and typify. This meeting was arranged to permit a discussion of these aspects between research workers and practitioners in ergonomics, industrial designers, manufacturers and government.
Screw
The first paper, dealing with ergonomics and product safety, was presented by M.C. Whittington of the Department of Safety and Hygiene at the University of Aston in Birmingham, and J.R. Wilson, of the Institute for Consumer Ergonomics at the University of Technology, Loughborough. They pointed to the increasing awareness by government and manufacturers of the need for improved consumer safety. In 1976, the Department of Prices and Consumer Protection issued a Green Paper "Consumer safety, a consultative document", and there are impending changes in product liability legislation, instanced by the Law Commission's 1975 Working Paper No 64 "Liability for defective products", and a supplement to the Bulletin of European Communities in 1976 on product liability. To improve consumer safety by better product design necessitates the identification, collection and interpretation of relevant data, much of which is collected in isolated and perhaps unrealistic laboratory situations. Such tests take no account of factors such as possible misuse by the user, nor the domestic conditions under which it is operated. The authors suggested that for many products user trials either in "test houses" or in the homes of appropriate consumers might be a necessary complement to traditional laboratory testing.