A MARINE DESIGN APPROACH TO WFSV BRIDGE LAYOUT DEVELOPMENT AND CREW TRANSFER

The aim of Marine Design is to improve the human factors, functionality and aesthetics of a vessel or system, and its' marketability. The role of a Marine Designer is to create and execute design solutions for problems of form, usability, ergonomics, marketing, brand development, and sales. Based on the principles of Industrial Design, the objective of which is to study both function and form, and the connection between product (vessel or system), the user and the environment. User Centred Design (UCD) is a process in which the needs, requirements, and capabilities of crew members as end users of a vessel or system, are given extensive consideration at each phase of the design process. UCD is a sequenced problem solving process that requires marine designers to analyse and anticipate end user behaviour in working on a vessel or system, and to test the validity of these assumptions through ethnographic analysis of real users. Ethnographic analysis is necessary due to the challenge for marine designers to intuitively understand the experiences of a first-time user (crew member) of their vessel or system design. UCD answers questions about users, their tasks and goals, then uses the findings to inform the design process with specific user scenarios. This paper reports on an ethnographic analysis carried out onboard a WFSV to evaluate current navigational practices and other command and control activities specific to WFSV, including technician transfer to the turbine. The ethnographic analysis informed an ergonomic analysis carried out using the Digital Human Modelling (DHM) software RAMSIS, which allowed the bridge displays to be evaluated in the virtual design space