MOTM

In the industrial design world, when you are designing something like this,
you usually refer to the holy-of-holies, the Dreyfus Charts. These are a
detailed ergonomic study of every way that you can think of for the human
body to move and interact with something, all age groups, developed over
many decades of study.

Basically with a curved control console, you try to figure out how the
person will be seated, correct posture, etc. That always comes first. Then
you scribe an arc (in profile) using the ball & socket joint of the shoulder
as the pivot point, and try to get your control surfaces to conform roughly
to this arc. It creates a theoretical inside-sphere for each arm, and then
you kind of average them out, if you are going for a "full-surround control
cabin" kind of thing.

In the case of MOTM modules, you then have the secondary consideration, as
was mentioned, of the patchcords interfering with the knobs under them, so
you may have to adjust them out from there. (Do a little "stretch tuning.")

And finally, there is another arc that needs to be considered, that from the
eyes to the control surfaces.

But that's the ID theory of approaching this kind of thing, anyway. A lot of
it is common sense, but there have been MANY studies for this done,
especially for things like nuclear power plant control rooms (a friend of
mine's father, a psychologist actually, was one of a team of designers doing
the design of nuclear plant control consoles... fascinating stuff).

If you don't have a copy of the Dreyfus ergonomic studies, pick up and old
Star Trek [TOS] Technical Manual and look for the sectional cutaways of the
bridge consoles. They look like they were lifted right out of the former.


 -----Original Message-----
From: 	J. Larry Hendry [mailto:jlarryh@...] 
Sent:	Wednesday, 21 February, 2001 9:10 AM
To:	motm@yahoogroups.com
Subject:	Re: [motm] Rack Rails -> "C" shaped cases

Moe and I discussed this at length when he first showed me his design.
Hopefully he can speak more to the exact nature of his trials.  But,
obviously, anytime you use cabinets that come together at an inside angle
this is an issue.  I think the amount of angle has to be a big factor in
whether is works well or not.  Moe did a lot of "mock up" work to assure it
wasn't an issue in his case.

How 'bout it Moe?  Did you come up with any magic guidelines like "X number
of degrees seem to be the magic angle between two modules, one above the
other, without space between, that can be used without unacceptable
interference."