Synthesis of Universal Workplace Design in Assembly - A Case Study

To form an inclusive and sustainable society, workplace design that can be used by different individuals, regardless of sex, language, background, and body function variations is needed. Such workplaces can also give economic benefits to companies if they provide a more accessible, safer, more productive and error proofed working environment. This aim of this paper is to evaluate a universal design concept developed at a company aiming at providing an "easy job"-workplace design for manual industrial operations. The study investigated key factors from 8 interviews and compared it to theoretical constructs such as WHO's ICIDH-2. A synthesis was formed that included the following factors: personal factors, environmental factors and outcomes of universal work. The study has resulted in new insights regarding universal workplace design and the vision is that the synthesis can be used by other production companies that want to increase the universal design in assembly work.