Task demands and human capabilities in door use

Doors are ubiquitous in the built environment, but despite their frequent use by people and their involvement in over 300,000 injuries per year (USA), they are little studied from a human factors perspective. This paper provides a classification scheme for doors based on human/door interaction and a prototypical task analysis of door use. Two observational studies were performed on a particular type of door. The first observed 1600 human/door interactions and found that people's use of force-enhancing strategies increased for larger doors, particularly for people of smaller stature. The second observed 800 interactions with push doors and found that the point where force is exerted is higher for taller individuals and closer to the center of the door than is typically assumed for placing handles. The second study was partly corroborated by measuring the position of wear patterns on doors. As is expected in human factors, the way people used doors was a function of both task demands and human capabilities. These results suggests that those specifying doors for buildings use a restoring torque below 30 Nm and site the handle or push plate 250–350 mm from the door edge and 1000–1500 mm above the floor.