Data Visualizations for Interdisciplinary Communication in HFE

Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) academic and professional communities emphasize an interdisciplinary approach to help solve complex problems, particularly for New Product Development (NPD). Data visualization is an effective way of understanding complex data and information. The HFE research community has traditionally used static explanatory graphics to communicate with other disciplines and to support publications and conference presentations. These graphics are typically designed for collaborators and audiences that are familiar with the underlying data or graphical form. While there have been multiple attempts at visually communicating HFE concepts and data to other disciplines, not many attempts have been made to utilize spatio-temporal visualizations to understand the dynamic HFE data. The utilization of the visualized HFE data that are easily consumable in an interdisciplinary team will stimulate the effective application of HFE in NPD. This can also help interdisciplinary teams as well as university students studying tangential subjects like Industrial Design understand this data in order to facilitate NPD. The purpose of this study is to explore data visualization approaches that will help HFE professionals to effectively communicate HFE data to collaborators outside their disciplinary expertise. We conducted a literature review of existing static and dynamic anthropometric data visualizations that have been used by HFE professionals to communicate the results of ergonomic studies. Additionally, we used datasets from a previous intervention design study to develop spatio-temporal visualization examples. Our examples use three-dimensional space as well as the temporal nature of the digital medium in order to communicate a complete picture of the data in a cohesive manner. We developed these examples using the Processing programming language. The developed examples will be utilized to examine the effectiveness of data consumption from non HFE professionals, such as industrial designers, in future studies.