Current bundling of the knowledge on comfort and discomfort has been limited, while the need for this knowledge is crucial, since people use products related to comfort every day, such as clothes, hand tools, kitchen appliances, computers and their workstations at the office and home as well as seats in cars, trains, airplanes and at the office. If we look at the trends like “attention to health”, “graying of the workforce (and population)”, “environmental awareness” and “attention to well-being”, (dis)comfort is closely related to these issues as well. Currently, the term comfort is also often seen related to the marketing of products like chairs, cars, clothing, hand tools and even airplane tickets. In the scientific liter- ature the term discomfort shows up often, since it is used in research. A search of “Science Direct” using papers from 1980 through June 18, 2010 returned 104,794 papers including the term discomfort. Most of these studies refer to temperature as the source of the discomfort or patient comfort. There are also many application studies that use various systems to measure discomfort as a subjective phenomena to be related to musculo- skeletal injuries. Galinsky et al. (2000), for example, examined the effects of supplementary rest breaks on musculoskeletal discomfort. They found that discomfort in several areas of the body were significantly lower under the supplementary than under the conventional rest break schedule. The assumption is that there is a relationship between self-reported discomfort and musculo- skeletal injuries. This relationship was made clearer by Hamberg- van Reenen et al. in 2008, where local experienced musculoskeletal discomfort was measured in different body regions on a 10-point scale six times during a working day. She longitudinally tracked over 1700 participants and showed that those reporting higher discomfort in her measurements had an increased chance of back, neck and shoulder complaints three years later (the RR varied from 1.8 to 2.6). However, the theories relating comfort to products and product design characteristics are rather underdeveloped; the few papers explaining the concept of comfort are Helander and
Zhang (1997), De Looze et al. (2003), Moes (2005) and Kuijt-Evers et al. (2004). Therefore, this special issue will focus on papers that contribute to knowledge concerning product comfort and this editorial will discuss the model(s) that these papers support and combine them into a new model that better ties comfort parameters to products.