The Workspace Design approach: How users and ... - ResearchGate

piping in the new facility, as the length of the pipes could be a critical factor due to a risk of
hardening up of raw materials in the pipes.
4. The WSD intervention
The intervention by the WSD team was organized as two collaborative events, each consisting
of two workshops. Each workshop had a duration of approximately three hours. The events
were design games (Horgen et al., 1999; Johansson et al., 2002; Brandt & Messeter, 2004)
aimed at staging the meeting between the production management, two consulting design
engineers and three employees of the mixing plant. The design game format was aimed at
facilitating a collaborative design process between these actors. In the first event the
workshops were focusing on the layout of the new plant in which the new mixing machine
was to be installed. In the second event the two workshops were organized as use scenarios,
aiming at simulating work processes and ergonomics in the new plant.
4.1 The layout design game
The first event was a layout design game which took place in a meeting room in the company.
The WSD team had produced game boards and gaming pieces. During the two workshops, the
participants were sitting around a game board placed in the middle of the table. The game
board was a sketch of the floor plan of the existing mixing plant and the adjacent hall in
which the new mixing machine was to be placed. Coloured cardboard pieces represented
different artefacts in the plant. A WSD team member was designated as game master, and he
instructed the participants that the purpose of the design game was to set up a collaborative
design process on the layout of the new mixing plant. He also stressed that the workshop was
a sort of a ‘laboratory’ in which participants had the opportunity to explore different layout
possibilities.
In the first workshop the game board was based on the design engineers’ proposal for layout.
This layout was printed to the game board and was not moveable. The coloured gaming
pieces represented different issues in relation to workplace design, work tasks, and
equipment. They were filled in by the participants during the game. In this way, all the
participants could make enquiries to the design engineers’ proposal and this procedure
resulted in a number of possible solution proposals to identified problems. At the end of the
workshop homework was scheduled to the second workshop. The design engineers should
check up on some machine features, the production manager and the OHS coordinator should
investigate into regulations on fire and chemicals. Finally, the production manager suggested
that the operators should work on a new proposal for layout.
The second workshop started with reports from the production manager and the design
engineers on their homework. Next, the operators presented their layout proposal step-by-step
at a game board with moveable gaming pieces, each representing machines and equipment.
During the game they explained their reasons and ideas and a collaborative design process
started up. In the end, the game board was representing a layout including many of the
operators’ proposals, but during the collaborative design process other things had been
changed.
In short, the outcome of the layout design game was a proposal for the layout of the new
mixing plant which was quite different from the two proposals originally made by the two
consulting design engineers. Especially, the work practice experience and ideas brought in by
the employees had a profound influence on the new proposal for layout and also included
important aspects of ergonomics. The employees were able to highlight things which had not