Working Late Half-a-day in the life of ...

Introduction
Working Late is a four year research project addressing practice and policy Councils, forming the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) Programme. of ageing on how people live their lives. To facilitate later life working it is important to consider the user-needs of workers through their life course at work, as such, it is essential to Williams et al. in press). Demographic age changes have been observed and predicted for many years and can be attributed to the WWII baby boom of 1945 - 1950 to
Hammering, fastening, sawing, drilling and driving environments on multi-site workers Access, egress and picking up & carrying Job role Joiners Project team Multiple work environments

Table 1: Collaborator company participant information

Industry Construction New Build (domestic) New Build (commercial & education) Manufacturing Cement Manufacturing Maintenance engineers Working from a vehicle Layout & usability of space and equipment in a vehicle Care Worker

Sub-group

Animal Welfare

Progress
Inspectors &

Investigation

Hand tool use

By working closley with the collaborator companies we were able to jointly identify priority tasks/areas evidenced by the questionaire survey and triangulation interview phase of the research, as reported last year. In-depth, rich data collection; interviews, observations and objective measures were conducted and completed with 6-10 workers from the four collaborator organisations. Focus groups have also taken place with all organisations to co-develop solutions to workplace design problems to encourage healthy ageing and aid in communicating the role of good design and ergonomics practice to employers and employees. Data (images, personal stories, facilitation tools) from this phase of the research Half-a-day in the life of... is directly informing the development of OWL. The process of securing agreements and negotiating the administration of research, within participating organisations, has been slower than anticipated, as such we are also capturing the participatory process itself for our research to aid future collaborative research projects.

Method
This study had two stages; work shadowing and focus groups.
Picking up & Carrying

Aim
The aim of this aspect of the research was to focus on the role of good design and ergonomics in healthy working with the aim to help people work in a more comfortable and healthy way into later life.

The aim was to understand how participants used their workplace environment and equipment, whilst doing their jobs. Work shadowing involved spending Half-a-day with the participants. Interviews were conducted in relation to their views, experiences and observations were made of good design ergonomics in their workplace. Data was captured using videos and/or photographs to record work tasks. Participants also completed body discomfort scales. Antropometric data were also taken from some workers; Focus groups followed the Half-a-day in the life of with each company, here co-design and user-centred design ideas/solutions were explored. To aid the discussion and co-design process, artefacts were produced, these included; action, product and body cards (examples shown on this poster) as well as blank cards participants could draw on. These tools will also form part of the Organiser for Working Late (OWL) online resource.
Elaine Yolande Williams* Diane Gyi* Roger Haslam* Alistair Gibb+ for more information please email: e.y.williams2@lboro.ac.uk *Loughborough Design School +Civil and Building Engineering

Output
The Half-a-day in the life of research study was made up of ergonomics observations, objective data and in-depth interviews, followed by focus groups. For this, we have collaborated with four company had to withdraw due to organisational changes. We are now working on job tasks with four companies in three industries; construction, manufacturing and care work (please see Table 1).

References
Ilmarinen, J. & Rantanen, J. 1999, "Promotion of work ability during ageing", American Journal of Industrial Medicine, vol. 36, no. S1, pp. 21-23. Williams, E.Y., Gyi, D.E., Gibb, A.G.F. & Haslam, R. in press, "Ageing Productively through Design? A Survey of Cement Manufacturing Workers", Design Principles and Practices, An International Journal.

Picking up & Carrying