Dr. Akinturk showed that the design process of a small craft can be computerized, and new design nodes, such as crew safety or acceleration levels can be included in the preliminary design. This study goes one step further by directly including ergonomic criteria in the preliminary ship design process. In addition, the design platform selected, is an easily available one. It is shown that an integrated technical computing environment such as Matlab, can do the preliminary small craft design with the inclusion of ergonomic criteria. This demonstrates also that the methodology developed in this study can be implemented and extended easily by others. The ergonomic criteria include constraints on RMS motion amplitudes and accelerations, peak motion responses and ergonomic criteria that relate maintaining one s balance onboard of a ship to ship motions. In the last one, an empirical relation, developed by Kimura, is used between the first moments of the spectra of vertical and longitudinal accelerations on the deck and human balance. The study shows the effect of human factors on the principle dimensions of the boats and their operational speed. ukryj opis