Adapting Furniture to the Child – Ergonomics as a Main Tool in a Design Project

Abstract

Leading a research project on Product Design about children’s furniture, the aim is to create a better environment for children, adapting furniture to their physical and psychological needs, namely a high chair following child’s growth from 6 months up to 7 years of age. The goal is also to provide solutions, which may enable extended product life cycles, contributing to sustainability. Taking Ergonomics and Human Factors as a tool for the understanding of how children interact with furniture, this study searches for relations between 3 different approaches in an ergonomic level: an interview based study with pre-school children (direct users), along with drawing sessions; an interview based study with parents (indirect users); and an adaptability study with high chairs available in the market (case study). When comparing results and conclusions, these studies give a glance on how children are such a difficult target, highly subjective and prone to change. However, even if a relation between the results of the different approaches is sometimes narrow, is through the use of Ergonomics and Human Factors as one of the main tools in this design research project, that we can start to reach a better understanding of how can furniture be adapted to the child.