By Erwin Busselot, Director Business Innovation & Solutions, Ricoh Graphic Communications, Ricoh Europe
Ricoh Europe, London, April 4 2025 – Adjustable office chairs that accommodate various body types, electric drill handles that angle forward just 15 degrees to mirror the wrist’s neutral gripping position, well placed car arm rests or adjustable steering wheels, aesthetically pleasing smartphone design.
These are prime examples of how ergonomic design improves human interaction with products.
The Federation of European Ergonomics Societies outlines three types of ergonomics:
- Physical – human anatomical, anthropometric, physiological, and biomechanical characteristics and their relation to physical activity. This includes working postures, materials handling, repetitive movements, work related musculoskeletal disorders, workplace layout, and health and safety.
- Cognitive – mental processes, such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor response, as they affect interactions among humans and other elements of a system. This includes mental workload, decision making, skilled performance, human and computer interaction, human reliability, work stress, and training.
- Organisational – optimisation of socio-technical systems, such as organisational structures and processes. This includes crew resource management, work design, and new work paradigms.
Considering these in product design reduces user discomfort, stress, and the risk of injury while improving overall satisfaction and performance. Workplace injuries and healthcare costs for companies can be minimised and operator productivity increased.
In contrast products with poor ergonomics can result in decreased productivity, low morale and increased worker health claims or workplace accidents.
According to the Society of Occupational Medicine 65% of employees are suffering some level of work related back pain, neck pain or other musculoskeletal (MSK) issue that could be improved by better ergonomics.
A 2023 study by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work found a large number of workers in all sectors – between 40% and 75% – reported classical ergonomic risks.
More physical and ergonomic risks (except inactivity) were reported from eastern and southern EU Member States while more emotional demands (e.g. difficult clients, poor communication, and long working hours) were found in northern and central European countries.
Ergonomic design can help address these issues. It is an essential process of any product’s development and something Ricoh considers carefully.
iF Design Award 2025 winner of the Product category, the RICOH Pro™ VC80000 high speed inkjet press, features numerous ergonomically inspired features. The judges highlighted its automatic inspection and correction of potential print quality issues in real time, helping to ensure a consistently high level of print quality. This liberates the operator from having to regularly monitor print quality themselves, freeing them to focus on other tasks.
The press seamlessly automates time consuming pre production processes such as profiling of papers which are new to the press. It can automatically execute makeready tasks in advance of the working day – even before the operator arrives on site.
The Pro VC80000 is also designed to minimise operator maintenance and automate cleaning routines, etc. The press employs machine learning to monitor key components and ensure that they are substituted only when they really need to be replaced.
Another innovation has been the supply of ink in barrels. This results in the operator changing inks up to 20 times less often than if the press used the same 10 litre ink containers as its predecessor.
When applied consistently ergonomic design can support smoother adoption of new technology. This is one of the reasons why the controller and the Fiery DFE on the high speed inkjet RICOH Pro™ Z75 are common with the toner based RICOH Pro™ C9500 and RICOH Pro™ C7500.
The large touch panel GUI screen makes viewing and operation easy. The home screen presents easy to understand printer status and job queue display. At a glance, operators can see the status of the equipment, the paper setting status for each tray, the remaining amount of paper and ink, the status of jobs and the maintenance schedule.
All of which makes for simpler, faster production that increases capacity and contributes to operator fulfilment. A win win for everyone.
Ergonomics plays a key role in impactful product design from the iF winning RICOH Pro Z75 to the Red Dot1 recognised iDataT2 UHF
- The Red Dot Design Award is an international, annual design competition for product and industrial design, brand and communication design as well as design concepts. ↩︎