Abstract
This paper describes the philosophy and development of several functional anthropometric tools currently used in automotive workspace design. These functional tools are statistical models which describe the probabilistic location of the driving population's body landmarks within vehicle space as a function of the vehicles' packaging parameters. Such tools provide a more realistic alternative to selection of the so called ‘representative 5th percentile female and 95th percentile male’ used in the past to qualify accommodation of a given vehicle workspace. They end the ‘guestimation’ procedure of trying to apply the structural dimensions of single individuals of certain stature percentiles to a complex workspace arrangement to define its accommodation. Although the tools described in this paper are specific to automotive workspace design, the philosophy and methodology for development of such functional models can have universal application.
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