Dream, Design, Define

Personal privacy is a key component of every person's everyday life. Privacy can be exemplified in physical and psychological aspects. For example, you can physically have privacy in the comfort of your bedroom while having psychological privacy by not making eye contact with other individual's walking around a shopping mall. The General Data Protection Regulation calls for "privacy by design". What "privacy by design" means is that personal privacy is taken into full consideration throughout the engineering/design of a building. There are generally four faces of privacy- solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve. Solitude would be spending time on your own in a peaceful state. For me, solitude can be achieved by taking a run in the evenings/ early mornings when no one is around. Intimacy is another form of privacy that includes a couple or tight nit group of people. Some intimate moments can be achieved in dimly lit restaurants with private booths like ...

Similar to anthropometrics, ergonomics also uses human measurements to design spaces. The only difference with ergonomics is that its main purpose is to create a workspace using knowledge on human abilities/limitations to improve a persons interactions with that space. This can vary from the design set up of work desks to where the location of a hairdryer's handholds are placed. Dohrmann Consultings article on ergonomics states that the economic cost of work related injuries and illnesses is estimated to be $60 billion dollars. So how does ergonomics work? Ergonomics is fully based off anthropometric data, biomechanics of the human body, environmental physics, applied psychology, and social psychology in order to successfully apply all aspects that could impact an individual in order to design toward the end user. Ergonomics aims to create a safe,  comfortable and productive workspaces by bringing human abilities and limitations into the design of a workspace by including the ind...

When walking into a room, how many times have you hit your head when walking through the doorway? The likelihood is slim to none. This is because of Anthropometric use within design! Anthropometrics are basically the study of the human body and it's movements along the use of human measurements within a space to design specifically for the end user. When walking through an everyday doorway, the height of it is on average 6'8". This measurement is taken from anthropometric data from thousands of individual's varying heights to create a door way entry that is as user friendly as possible. Racquetball doors often don't meet the average height requirements (usually 3'6" tall) for a normal doorway. This is the door to our training room which has never been changed to a standard sized door since being repurposed as the triathlon training room. This is an example of bad anthropometric use! Photo taken by me at ETSU Anthropometrics were not only used for d...