Human Factors Engineering that Makes a Difference

In an effort to catch up on some reading this afternoon, I sat down with the journal article “Human Factors Engineering that Makes a Difference: Leveraging a Science of Societal Change” by Kim Vicente.

As you might have guessed by the title, the article focuses on outlining ways to effect societal change at both the corporate and political level.  Specifically, it acknowledges that the human factors and ergonomics discipline hasn’t been as successful as we might hope, identifies roadblocks to change, and reviews three theories that describe how change occurs that practitioners might consider adopting to facilitate “… the fit between people and technology in the service of humankind.” (p. 1)

Some of the more salient points include:

• “Human factors engineering is an inherently activist discipline because its overarching aim is to affect societal change.” (p. 1)
• “Have we really made a difference in changing the way government and corporations think about the relationship between people and technology, thereby making the most of the knowledge base that our discipline has worked so hard to develop over the last 60 or so years?” (p. 2)
• “If we repeatedly fail at effecting societal change, then our research and design efforts will have been for naught and we will fall short as a discipline.  Therefore, we have an obligation, not only to ourselves and to our discipline, but to society — the tax payers who fund much of our research and who are the intended ultimate beneficiaries of our work — to do everything we can to improve our ability to effect societal change, both in government and in the corporate world.” (pp. 21-22)

The article also covered eleven obstacles that make societal change difficult and thirteen recommendations that human factors and ergonomics practitioners might want to embrace to help effect change.

Overall, it’s a good read.  BTW, I would also recommend reading his book, “The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology.”

 Print This Post

Building Sustainable Human-Centered Systems

I recently read the book chapter, “Building Sustainable Human-Centered Systems: A Grand Challenge for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Discipline in the Conceptual Age,” written by Waldemar Karwowski.

Overall, it is a thought provoking piece that all human factors and ergonomics practitioners should read and absorb.  A few of the more noteworthy statements include:

• “As the world around us is rapidly changing through profound technological, economical, social, environmental, and cultural transformations, including the onset of a wired global society, globalization of consumer markets and outsourcing of manufacturing capabilities, but also experiencing the digital divide, increasing greenhouse gases pollution, and global climate changes, is the greatest challenge for the HF/E discipline and profession to fundamentally redefine itself, or simply refine and polish what it does today?” (p. 121)
• “…it seems that the greatest challenge of HF/E today is to develop a new mission of sustainable human-centered philosophy and design that advocates the systematic use of HF/E knowledge (and specifies what knowledge should this be?) in order to achieve compatibility in the design of environmentally, economically and socially sustainable interactive systems of people and technology.” (p. 125)
• “In the not too distance conceptual age, HF/E should provide a social contribution that matters by helping to solve global challenges such as energy and water security, population malnutrition and starvation, effects of armed conflicts and diseases, and contribute to increasing healthy life expectancy and economic prosperity of all citizens.” (p. 125)

 Print This Post