Ergonomics issues in furniture design: A case of a tabloid chair design

Ergonomics is a science that is focused on the study of human fit, and decreased fatigue and discomfort through product design. This science is extensively applied to various furniture designs in home and office taken into consideration how the furniture is designed to fit to its users. This research work concentrates to problems faced by students at Shah Jalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh, who are using tabloid chair in their day to day classroom environment. The objective of this research is to identify ergonomics viewpoints by using tabloid chair for sitting in classroom environment and its associated limitations or problems. To find out the limitations or constraints in using the tabloid chair, a survey on 160 university students were carried out by using the chair for sitting position in the classroom more than 1 h per day and accompanying body discomfort was critically investigated. The outcomes from this survey showed that body discomforts are found at elbow, back, neck, and thigh of 46, 41, 31, 33 students respectively. Based on the anthropometric data taken from those 160 students, an updated tabloid chair was designed and developed and presented in this paper. The tabloid chair as fabricated considering the proposed ergonomics design was also validated with respect to its materials and overhead costs.