Avaliação ergonômica do ambiente construído: estudo de caso da Universidade Integrada da Terceira Idade – UNITI/UFMA

Abstract

In the last two decades Universities, Federal Institutes and private institutions have intensified the process of interiorizing their campi (hitherto predominantly located in capitals), which has led to an accelerated construction of new buildings. Given the speed of the phenomenon, among other factors, many of these educational centers were opened without due attention to ergonomic factors, generating buildings that are inadequate from a human point of view, due to the standardization of projects. Thus, this article reports the process of ergonomic analysis of the built environment of the library of a Federal Institute of Education Science and Technology, recently installed in a city in the interior of a state in the Northeast of Brazil. Therefore, given the peculiarities of the school environment and specifically, the library, it was adopted for the analysis the Methodology for User-Centered Construction Projects, proposed by Attaianase and Duca (2012), following these steps: design briefing, definition of user profiles and adjustment groups, task analysis, adaptation to users' needs and first architectural details. Thus, the points that could be ergonomically improved in the environment were identified, and having the problems being pointed out, an interior design project was then elaborated with proposals for changes in the layout, among other recommendations. The goal was the ergonomic improvement of the built environment of the analyzed library, thus seeking an optimized space and greater comfort for the people utilizing it.

The Gender of Retirement in a Double-Ageing Country: Perspectives and Experiences of Retired Women and Men in Portugal

“…The first sub-theme concerns the experiences of women, who admitted that retirement was not meeting their expectations. They reported a predominance of negative experiences at this stage, connected with ageism [i.e., age-based negative attitudes; e.g., [14] and the respective negative representation of age that predominates in our society. However, we can also perceive some positive experiences reported by these women, who highlighted the time spent with their grandchildren: Retirement always scared me because it was significant of old age.…”

“…Finally, studying this topic will also help to demystify the mistaken beliefs that exist in relation to this stage of life, which is still neglected and considered one of the least interesting stages of human life [4], since the lack of knowledge about the process of growing old leads to negative attitudes towards it [12]. A growing body of authors has demonstrated how older people are a target of ageism, i.e., negative attitudes and practices based on the age of individuals, e.g., [13,14].…”