ERGONOMIC DESIGN RECOMMENDATIONS BASED ON AN ACTUAL CHAINSAW DESIGN

To develop high quality products, a designer has to consider various influential factors, one of which is ergonomics. And to fashion a specific product for the user, a designer needs expert knowledge of the user's requirements. However, expert knowledge can also be accessed through an intelligent advisory system for ergonomic design support. The effectiveness of such an expert system depends mainly on the quality of the knowledge base and on the appropriateness of the system's inference engine. Data for the system's knowledge base can be collected in different ways. One approach is to study relevant projects to collect appropriate ergonomic solutions; another is to recognise bottlenecks in ergonomic design. This paper presents a case study of the design of an actual chainsaw with emphasis on ergonomic design solutions - that can be transformed into ergonomic design recommendations. At the end of the paper, an application of one of the derived recommendations within the knowledge base of the intelligent advisory system is presented.