Don B. Chaffin smiles and poses for a portrait.

Don B. Chaffin

Richard G. Snyder Distinguished University Professor Emeritus
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email

dchaffin@umich.edu

Location

2761 IOE

Phone

(734) 763-2245

Biography

Back in the early 1960s, Don Chaffin spent a summer as a quality control engineer in a ball bearing plant. Chaffin, then a freshly-minted General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) graduate, supervised 28 women who assembled tiny ball bearings for military guidance systems. Since a speck of dust could cause a bearing to fail inspection, the women worked in a sterile environment using magnifying glasses and microscopes. The pressure for precision was intense; the failure rate was high, and they frequently called Chaffin over to their workstations to point out things that made their jobs more difficult.

He noticed the toll that physical strain and fatigue took on the workers in the plant, and he started collecting data. The information he gathered hinted at trouble ahead.

It convinced Chaffin, today the R.G Snyder Distinguished University Professor emeritus of  Industrial and Operations Engineering and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, that problems in the work environment – distraction, fatigue, confusion – were contributing to injuries and defective products.

That early work laid the foundation for a pioneering career in what’s become known as ergonomics – a discipline that resolves conflicts between a human and a system for the benefit of both. It blends engineering with psychology, biomechanics, epidemiology, and organizational structure. Good ergonomics result in healthy people working in an efficient system. It leads to fewer injuries, fewer mistakes, better productivity.

In 1979 Chaffin, then chair of the Industrial and Operations Engineering department, helped establish the university’s Center for Ergonomics, the first and largest center of its kind at the time. The research that he and his colleagues performed led the field into the mainstream and the one- and two-week training courses they held around the country educated thousands of doctors, engineers and safety professionals.

“It’s the way most companies run, nowadays,” he said.

Chaffin’s extensive work in understanding physical strains in the workplace have led some to call him the “Father of Occupational Biomechanics,” though he’s quick to clarify that a lot of people have contributed to the discipline. (That he co-authored one of the field’s definitive textbooks, Occupational Biomechanics does little to help him shed the title.)

Chaffin’s experience in factories – including time at a huge Western Electric plant where repetitive strain injuries hampered a third of the plant’s 20,000 workers – convinced him that engineers needed a broad body of knowledge to help them design healthier work settings.

As a PhD student at Michigan in the mid-1960s, Chaffin developed a model to predict the metabolic heat people generate when they work. When he returned to U-M as a faculty member in 1969 he led a team that developed an extensive strength database. He and his students then evolved that database into a software package  – now licensed by the University and used by companies all over the world – that helps engineers design manual tasks based on a typical range of capabilities.

In 1998 Chaffin founded and directed the Human Motion Simulation (HuMoSim) Laboratory, which converts models of people’s natural motions into dynamic simulations that can be reproduced in computer-aided design programs.

Through the 1980s and 90s Chaffin and his colleagues were at the forefront of ergonomics research as the field became its own occupation – a common ground that both labor and management could agree upon.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, workplace injury and illness cases in automotive manufacturing dropped from 238,800 in 1994 to 10,000 in 2013.

Today physical ergonomics has become a field of practice; the newest research frontiers in involve cognitive ergonomics – reducing mental stress and fatigue.

Every new work setting and every new piece of technology introduces potential unintended consequences for the people who use it. Cellphones and tablets demand our attention; our cars offer more entertainment and communication features, all potentially operated by someone driving 70 mph.

The future of ergonomics research, Chaffin says, is in helping people make good decisions quickly amid all the available data and the technology that delivers it.

“Psychology, biomechanics, computer science and engineering need to pull together to create ways to present data so the right data is ready at the right time,” he said. “It’s a very exciting era of ergonomics.”