News

With a communication dated 10 June, the ISO (International Standardization Organization) informed its members that, in consideration of the evolution of the COVID-19 situation, it decided to readmit the possibility of holding meetings in presence, letting the coordinators of the groups and committees choose between online, hybrid or physical meetings.

In line with the ISO decision, the CEN (European standardization body) also decided to resume face-to-face meetings and the working group that deals with office seatings immediately acknowledged this: the upcoming in-person meeting has already been planned for next mid-September. Catas will be the location!

Even though we learned during the pandemic that standardization work can also be carried out through virtual meetings, there remain certain activities that must take place face-to-face to be carried out effectively. The so-called workshops, meetings in which the standard is applied by carrying out practical tests, cannot be managed online and only make sense if carried out in person, allowing experts to compare their views in the real case. Specifically, the September workshop will complete a major project, launched shortly before the pandemic outbreak, to analyze the method of measuring the dimensions of office chairs described by EN 1335-1 and ISO 24496. All the main European laboratories have carried out repeated measurements on the same office chairs, exactly four of them, representative of the products currently available on the market, entrusting the coordination of the project and the statistical analysis of the data to Catas (eng. Gianpaolo Baggio and dr. Annamaria Franz took care of this activity). The results of the work resulted in a series of observations on the measurement method described by the standard, which were collected by Levent Çaglar, ergonomist of FIRA UK, and will be discussed collectively at the workshop.
We have equipped our spaces both for hybrid sessions and for face-to-face meetings and we are really pleased that the standardization activities for the furniture sector in presence will restart just from Catas!


For information:
Paolo Balutto
+39 0432 747226
balutto@catas.com