New perspectives in intervention for health at work: analyzing design work to transform design practices

This presentation focuses on trades in design of work situations. We are proposing an emerging research project associating an engineer and an occupational psychologist. Our principal aim is to help designers to better take into account the health and safety of operators, future users of these production systems. In this multidisciplinary framework, we are developing a new intervention method with designers, aiming to transform their practices (methods, tools, etc.).
Our main objective is to prevent accidents and occupational diseases, and we argue that the work analysis of operators - their skills, ingenuity, but also their difficulties and constraints in their daily work - is a prerequisite to carry out a preventive approach. Ergonomic studies highlight the need to consider the activity of operators in designing processes, in order to improve their future working conditions. It also points out the difficulties to intervene directly during design work and design choices. These studies underline the problems which may arise in the future and the lack of opportunities to transform and correct the production systems.
From a recurrent finding, we are being created another way to transform design practices with a new analysis framework directly with the engineers’ designers. We argue our research perspective through an intervention in an automotive supplier company, in the context of a production line re-designing. Firstly, we are presenting our initial results with a co-analysis of a designer’s daily work to better understand: his trades and its characteristics, his constraints, dilemmas and resources for his work, his own rooms for maneuver to carry out a design project within a team gathering various engineering specialties. Then, we are presenting how this exploratory work analysis becomes useful for the rest of our project.
Lastly, this first result allows us to construct an intervention methodology centered on the designers’ trades. This approach helps them to transform their tools and design practices and better apprehending operators’ work, with an occupational health perspective.