Development of a designer-oriented Digital Human Model

Development of a designer-oriented Digital Human Model

Schaefers, D.H.

Ruiter, I.A. (mentor)
Song, Y. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Master of Science Integrated Product Design

2011-07-01

Digital Human Models (DHMs) or 3D anthropometric human models are important tools in the design process for ergonomic evaluation of products. Currently, few DHMs fit the specific requirements of industrial designers regarding a synthesis of the scope, affordability, validity, usability and compatibility. In this thesis, a prototype DHM is proposed with designer-oriented features. To identify the problems and needs of the designers, literature research, questionnaires, surveys and observational research were conducted to formulate the initial list of requirements for the proposed DHM. Besides conventional functionalities of DHMs, the list of requirements has an additional set of functions and requirements which are tailored towards the identified needs of the industrial designers. Based on SolidWorks®, a DHM prototype was developed and tested with a product evaluation experiment. The results and feedback led to an optimized model and a second product evaluation experiment was conducted on a larger scale within the bachelor course “Modeling” with 2nd year students. Results reveal that the prototype fills the basic needs of a DHM and has its unique designer-oriented features, especially in usability, affordability and compatibility. Limitations of the proposed DHM are also found regarding the robustness, the usability and the functionality. Those identified limitations contribute to the fine-tuning of the list of requirements for developing a more advanced designer-oriented DHM. A future outlook will include amongst other things: switching to another programming language, making the manipulating of limbs more intuitive, possibilities for custom data import and linking the project to 3D scanning.

Digital Human Model
anthropometry
requirements
industrial designer
usability

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1b725c0f-da49-487a-9bf0-a124c5cb1c00

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Schaefers, D.H.