Errors, accidents and self-assembly products

There is no formal evidence of consumer issues with the construction of self-assembly furniture and the level of errors and accidents is unknown. To rectify this 1295 face-to-face interviews were carried out in a survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics. This revealed that 52% of adults in the UK have assembled self-assembly furniture in the last 2 years. Of these, it was estimated that 3 million UK adults have damaged the item being assembled and 1.8 million received a minor injury. More seriously, a potential 100000 people required medical attention for injuries sustained during assembly. It is clear that consumers do have problems during self-assembly tasks. Richardson et al., (2006) provide the basis for a solution through a method for evaluating the difficulty of assembly tasks. Such methods would allow the level of difficulty, and therefore potential for errors and accidents, in an assembly to be reduced.