All in a Day’s Work: Lab Focuses on Human Factors of Today’s Work Environment

by Andris Freivalds

Ben Niebel was the long-time head of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (1955-1978) and the original author of a very popular industrial engineering textbook (Methods, Standards, and Work Design), now in its thirteenth edition. Due to his generosity and an endowment established in 1997, the Ben Niebel Work Design Lab was developed in the then newly constructed Leonhard Building.

This laboratory serves two purposes. It is the main teaching laboratory for the various work design courses: IE 327, Introduction to Work Design; IE 408, Cognitive Work Design; IE 419, Work Design-Productivity and Safety; and IE 553, Engineering of Human Work.

Simultaneously, it serves as the research laboratory for physical ergonomics and work design. Consequently, well over a hundred students use it per semester, including not only undergraduate and graduate students of the department for their required courses but also WISER (Women in Science and Engineering Research) students and other potential students who might be interested in majoring in industrial engineering after being exposed to the types of research being performed here.

Among the major pieces of equipment housed in this lab are: eight workstations with a PC, each accommodating three students; a treadmill and an exercise bicycle ergometer; metabolic and strength measuring equipment; two industrial workstations; and a variety of smaller instruments to measure noise, light, heat stress, hearing, vision, anthropometry, etc.

The PC workstations are used regularly for students to watch videos of real-life jobs on which they perform time or work sampling studies to determine a standard time for those jobs and/or also redesign those jobs to more ergonomically acceptable standards.

The smaller instruments measure human capabilities and limitations, as well as environmental conditions that need to be optimized for jobs.

The exercise and metabolic equipment help graduate students understand work physiology and human limitations on 8-hour a day jobs.

Andris Freivalds is a professor of industrial engineering. He joined Penn State in 1980. Freivalds is a fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers and the Ergonomics Society. His awards and honors include the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society’s Outstanding Research, Outstanding Teaching, and Premier Teaching Awards.

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