Assistance Needs in Production Environments: A Contextual Exploration of Workers’ Experiences and Work Practices

This paper presents assistance needs in production environments for assembly processes from a workers’ perspective, i.e. what kind of assistance assembly workers would need to enhance their everyday work experience and to better cope with challenges coming along with an increasing digitization in these work environments. Within a large-scale empirical field study in central Europe, we interviewed assembly workers and observed everyday work situations in different production environments (e.g., automotive domain) to understand workers’ experiences and work practices in increasingly connected and automated production environments. Based on the insights gained in this study, we describe several assistance needs for assembly workers that serve as a guidance for future worker-centric designs of assistance systems in production environments.