Organizational and social aspects of integrating working environment considerations into product development

New insights can be gained into conditions for integrating working environment aspects into product development and engineering in general by analysing the development process as a social shaping process as opposed to the rational and linear process often used in ergonomics.Integrating working environment aspects is not merely the individual design engineer's responsibility. Integration has to be treated as a social and organizational problem. It does not mean that the individual engineer need not know about working environment. But integration of working environment aspects into engineering demands changes in the subculture of designing, changes in the object worlds of the different actors and changes in organizational systems within enterprises.