These lecture notes were not written as a course handout, but as a resource for lectures. Therefore, references and comments will not always be complete.
(part 1 of 4)
This is the last part in this section of the course. So far we have considered what Human Factors is and offered a case (from error) as to why Human Factors work is important, if not crucial. Although we concentrated on safety critical systems, we hope it is becoming apparent why Human Factors is generally important.
In this lecture I want to begin to address the question 'When and How do we apply Human factors knowledge?'. As I have said a number of times, when and how human factors work is applied depends largely on your outlook on how the resources (e.g. financial, time) that are available and on the artifact that is being designed, its distribution and the intended user groups. The last part of the course will also go into this in some detail.
In addition, I would like to offer an introduction to the Human Operator, considering the issues I raised last week: anthropometrics, biomechanics, behavioural, cognitive and social issues. This is a way of partitioning the human user and for many designs all these issues need to be considered. However, as I mentioned in the first lecture, consideration of cognitive and social issues is relatively new. There are many books in the library on anthropometrics and biomechanics and this tends to be the central concern of many ergonomics texts and engineering texts. I hope however, you are becoming aware of the cognitive, social and cultural issues.
Although I will raise a number of issues which are pertinent to design in this lecture, I will leave more detailed discussion of the design cycle and of Human Factors work within the design cycle to Lecture 7 when I begin to talk about methods within Human Factors work.
Design Failures: we have already discussed Kegworth, French Air Bus, etc.
Know that latent failures can be designed in.
Three mile island was described before it happened
18 out of 22 of the issues raised in the incident were Human Factors problems
most of the failures were latent human failures
The Pueblo Indians housing disaster
greeting to the sun in the morning
therefore the front door needs to face East
the prototype just happened to be correct
system, designer and user models
What are design relevant user characteristics