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The purpose of this paper is to present an environmental psychological case study regarding an office design change. The employees of the researched company had the chance to decide whether to stay in the classic open office set-up or to switch to a shared desk supplemented by a one-day-a-week home office possibility. The authors examined the development of participants’ territorial behaviour and place attachment.

The given organizational situation is a quasi-experimental design; the variables were examined via questionnaire in a longitudinal model. Quantitative measurement was supplemented with focus group discussions.

The degree of personalization (a type of territorial behaviour) decreased significantly not only among those who lost their permanent workstations – as we expected – but also in the entire population. Workplace attachment stagnated for the entire population, but workstation attachment showed a significant decrease among those who switched to the shared desk.

The limitations and the advantages are also followed by the nature of a case study: high ecological validity with relatively low sample size.

Redesigning an office is never just an economic or interior design issue, but a psychological one. This paper provides practical environmental psychological insights into implementing office designs without permanent individual workstations.

This paper presents the environmental psychological background of shared desk design implementation. The authors point out the significance of repressing personalization behaviour and as per the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to introduce the concept of workstation attachment.

Many problems occur when assigning tasks to work centres, especially in determining the required number of workstations for line balancing which requires a minimum theoretical number of workstations. The most common problem is bottleneck. In this paper, a method is proposed to solve floating tasks problem in single-model line when the actual required number of workstations exceeds the minimum theoretical number, and the standard time of the floating task (work center) exceeds the cycle time. The floating task will represent a critical bottleneck activity in line. The proposed method depends on minimizing the standard time of critical bottleneck and non-critical activities by a minimum free-floating time depends on the average of slack times of the non-critical activities, and it will increase the line efficiency from (77%) to (88%), and balance delay is minimized from (23%) to (12%).

The purpose of this paper is to review the prevalence and risk factors of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) among healthcare workers (HCWs) in order to ascertain the occupation with the highest susceptibility to WMSD in the health sector. This paper will also review the effective interventions which have been used to prevent WMSDs among HCWs.

This study is a literature review of 11 papers related to the prevalence and risk factors of WMSDs and 12 papers about the interventions being used to prevent WMSDs among HCWs. The papers were retrieved from respectable databases such as PubMed, Science Direct, Google Scholar and E-Thesis.

Nurses belong to the major group of HCWs who had the highest prevalence of WMSDs compared with other health professionals and other hospital workers. Although there are several interventions being commonly used to prevent WMSD risk factors, some interventions were unsuccessful in the prevention of WMSDs in healthcare tasks. Therefore, it is necessary that future research focuses on the tasks of HCWs that are WMSD risk factors and tries to innovate or redesign ergonomic workstations to prevent those risk factors.

The expected benefit of this study is to motivate ergonomists to provide appropriate and innovative interventions to ensure health and safety for nurses and other HCWs.

Increasing demand on rail transport speeds up the introduction of new technical systems to optimize the rail traffic and increase competitiveness. Remote control of trains is seen as a potential layer of resilience in railway operations. It allows for operating and controlling automated trains and communicating and coordinating with other stakeholders of the railway system. This paper aims to present the first results of a multi-phased simulator study on the development and optimization of remote train driving concepts from the operators’ point of view.

The presented concept was developed by benchmarking good practices. Two phases of iterative user tests were conducted to evaluate the user experience and preferences of the developed human-machine-interface concept. Basic training requirements were identified and evaluated.

Results indicate positive feedback on the overall system as a fallback solution. HMI elicited positive emotions regarding pleasure and dominance, but low arousal levels. Train drivers had more conservative views on the system compared to signalers and students. The training activities achieved increased awareness and understanding of the system for future operators. Inclusion of potential users in the development of future systems has the potential to improve user acceptance. The iterative user experiments were useful in obtaining some of the needs and preferences of different user groups.

Multi-phase user tests were conducted to identify and to evaluate the requirements and preferences of remote operators using a simplified HMI. Training analysis provides important aspects to consider for the training of future users.