Really unergonomic typing form and posture combined with horrendously unergonomic equipment and furniture is pretty much the standard in most office jobs. (For people who have spent time thinking about the subject, it’s quite depressing to walk around offices and see a large proportion of the workers typing with constantly extended wrists, arms outstretched, hunched or slouched backs, etc.)
It is entirely possible to type (at high speed in continuous bursts of 20–30m, with short breaks between) for 5+ hours per day every day for decades without injuries. The key is to reduce static load on the muscles and put joints in a neutral position, and make sure to occasionally move around.
It used to be that people who did such work first went to secretary school where they were trained in the proper form by experts. Now, everyone teaches themselves with no external feedback, and uses whatever equipment they happen to find lying around, most of which was incompetently designed, with a heavy priority on cost cutting. Almost no office workers are trained in office ergonomics.
The office furniture and computer hardware industries (along with government research funders, etc.) have been underinvesting in ergonomics research for 40+ years. The keyboards now are worse than what was typically used in the 1970s–80s, and desks and chairs are generally about the same. Official ergonomics standards developed by national and international organizations simply codify existing bad practices instead of trying to work out better designs from first principles.
What ergonomics research is done typically investigates how (small samples of) people will react to very slightly different design choices in the short term if given no training and little adjustment time. Usually the measurements taken are methodologically suspect. It’s a mess.
Comments
Really unergonomic typing form and posture combined with horrendously unergonomic equipment and furniture is pretty much the standard in most office jobs. (For people who have spent time thinking about the subject, it’s quite depressing to walk around offices and see a large proportion of the workers typing with constantly extended wrists, arms outstretched, hunched or slouched backs, etc.)
It is entirely possible to type (at high speed in continuous bursts of 20–30m, with short breaks between) for 5+ hours per day every day for decades without injuries. The key is to reduce static load on the muscles and put joints in a neutral position, and make sure to occasionally move around.
It used to be that people who did such work first went to secretary school where they were trained in the proper form by experts. Now, everyone teaches themselves with no external feedback, and uses whatever equipment they happen to find lying around, most of which was incompetently designed, with a heavy priority on cost cutting. Almost no office workers are trained in office ergonomics.
The office furniture and computer hardware industries (along with government research funders, etc.) have been underinvesting in ergonomics research for 40+ years. The keyboards now are worse than what was typically used in the 1970s–80s, and desks and chairs are generally about the same. Official ergonomics standards developed by national and international organizations simply codify existing bad practices instead of trying to work out better designs from first principles.
What ergonomics research is done typically investigates how (small samples of) people will react to very slightly different design choices in the short term if given no training and little adjustment time. Usually the measurements taken are methodologically suspect. It’s a mess.