Control Room Ergonomics

Control Room Design and Ergonomics

Whether a 999 control room call centre, power station, nuclear power plant, or oil refinery, the design of the control room lies at the heart of its overall performance.

Morgan Maxwell are experts in control room design and ergonomics, providing a full evaluation of the room and applying the science of human factors. Applying a user-centered design process provides focus on ensuring a thorough understanding of human operator tasks and competencies. Our control room design and ergonomics teams have been responsible for the control room ergonomics on a number of 999 and 111 safety-critical control rooms.

Operator’s wellbeing, performance and risk of human error are dependent on how the physical, social and psychological elements of the system support their ability to complete their day-to-day tasks. Working alongside standards such as ISO 11064 Ergonomics Design of Control Centres provides the appropriate working environment to minimise the risk of reduced wellbeing, performance and human error.

Control room Ergonomics design process

• Clarify goals and requirements
  A partnership approach is adopted to ensure we understand your goals and requirements.
• Organisational and behavioral insights.
  Using Ethnographic and other research methods we look to understand how your employees actually work, how they solve problems and how they work within their teams. We investigate what areas within your current design affect organisational wellbeing and productivity.
• Environmental measurements and standards
  Acoustics, thermal and lighting design elements are taken into account at the earliest possible stage to ensure high levels of wellbeing and productivity.
• Control room design
  The design is based on findings from our research-based approach to ensure the working environment is designed around the user’s tasks. Our ergonomics consultants can model up virtual control rooms using digital human modeling software. Get in touch for more information.

Our approach to control room ergonomics

• User-Centered Design

Understanding the users and their tasks. We take into account user competencies, procedures they follow, training provided, communications process, workloads and supervision, shift patterns and the safety culture.

• Control Room Layout

Control room layout is derived from a detailed understanding of the user and their needs. The layout is focused on reducing distractions from the environment.

• Acoustics

Working to standards such as ISO 11064 and BS EN ISO 3382-3 our qualified acousticians ensure the acoustic environment allows users in safety-critical systems to communicate without the risk of misunderstanding key information.

Our qualified acousticians will also measure speech ineligibility to ensure that users of the control room are not distracted by unwanted conversation. This is called the ‘distraction distance’.

Our approach covers the A-B-C of acoustics, Absorb-Block-Cover for reverberation control and speech privacy.

• Thermal and lighting

Part of the control room investigation is to ensure the thermal and lighting conditions match the tasks being completed.  Working to standards such as ISO 11064 provides the appropriate working environment to reduce the risk of human error and promote wellbeing and productivity.