Conception et santé : quelques remarques sur le statut de l’activité de travail dans la conception des systèmes de production

The aim of this article is to discuss the status of activity at work for the design process. After having highlighted the stakes to take into account activity at work during design, three approaches are discussed. One can try to model the workers’ activity in order to anticipate it during the design process. One can try to support the design of flexible systems, which control activity. One can try to catch and articulate in a same process the development of both the situation and the activity. These different positions result in different understanding of the design process mainly in its temporal dimension. For each approaches, some lines of research are presented.     

Early static standing is associated with prolonged standing induced low back pain

Previous research points to the lack of movement during prolonged standing as a pre-disposing factor to low back pain (LBP). Such movements could be at the level of the lumbar spine or at the foot–ground interface. The primary purpose of this in vivo study was to determine if there were differences in magnitude, region, and frequency of movement patterns between non-pain developers (non-PDs) and standing induced pain developers (PDs). Thirty-two participants reported their LBP development using a visual analog scale over 2-h of prolonged standing. Time-varying lumbar spine kinematics were used to assess the magnitude and frequency of lumbar spine fidgets and shifts. Ground reaction forces were used to assess the magnitude and frequency of whole body weight transfers and anterior–posterior center of pressure movements. Fourteen of 32 participants (43.75%) were categorized as PDs. The first 15 min of standing distinguished the two pain groups, as non-PD performed a higher frequency of lumbar spine flexion/extension fidgets and large body weight transfers. Both of these differences may be pre-disposing factors for transient LBP development, as they both occurred prior to PDs reaching the 10 mm visual analog scale threshold for LBP classification.     

Comprendre l’activité de conception d’agriculteurs en transition agroécologique : vers un modèle trilogique de la conception

This article examines the agroecological transition as a design process led by farmers on their farms. The objective of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the design activity implemented by two cereal growers in France engaged in a conversion to organic farming. To this end, several interviews were conducted and supported by the Chronicle of Change Method (Chizallet et al., 2018). They are analysed on the basis of the dialogical model of design understood as a dialogue between the “virtual” and the “real” (Béguin, 2011) to which we propose to add a third dimension: the “designable”. The results obtained contribute to a better understanding of the design activity and to characterize it through a trilogical design model that includes the “virtual”, the “real”, and the “designable”. These results are discussed in the light of research studies emphasizing the temporality of actors’ trajectories, which make it possible to enrich the characterization of the design activity proposed in this article. Finally, this article proposes ways to improve the Chronicle of Change Method.