ERGONOMICS : It’s not just chairs and cockpits anymore. Industry is designing computers--even industrial plants--that match, not overwelm, human ability.
It’s Anna Wichansky’s job to make sure that the office of the future serves the needs of people, not machines.
Trained as an experimental psychologist, Wichansky applies her knowledge of human thinking processes and limitations to the development of computers and software at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto.
Wichansky helps design computer operating procedures that don’t force office workers to think like computer programmers.
She works on screen displays that present information in the colors and images and sequences that people can most readily assimilate.
With her colleagues, she is developing computer systems that allow several people to manipulate data simultaneously--just as they would sitting around a table problem-solving, but with the power of electronics to aid them.
“We want to make all this fantastic technological capability available to the ordinary knowledge worker in the ordinary office,” Wichansky explained. “We present the human bias in technological systems.”
Roots in Aerospace
Wichansky is an expert in human factors--the science of matching jobs, machines and working environments to workers’ capabilities.
Known also as ergonomics, human factors is among the fastest growing technical disciplines. And with its roots in aerospace and defense and its present and future in the computer industry, the profession is growing fastest in California, where hundreds of human factors specialists work for defense contractors, computer manufacturers, software design firms and consulting companies.
“There are probably more human factors people in the Southern California area than . . . anyplace else in the United States,” said Mark S. Sanders, a professor of psychology who teaches human factors courses at California State University, Northridge, one of about 60 American colleges to offer a degree in human factors.
Unlike its cousin, industrial engineering, human factors is concerned with more than finding efficient ways to get a job done. And unlike designers, human factors experts cannot be satisfied with a product or system that merely is pleasant to the senses.
In human factors thinking, people come first.
“Rather than forcing the individual into the shoe, you design the shoe to fit,” said Kent S. Harris, senior working systems consultant for Pacific Gas & Electric in San Francisco.
Human factors emerged as a discipline during World War II, in studies of such issues as fighter pilots’ decision-making capabilities at high speeds and the optimal design of cockpit controls.
After the war, “knobs and dials,” as the field was known, slowly attracted the attention of consumer products manufacturers, designers and architects, who began to incorporate ergonomic features in the design of products ranging from toothbrushes to office chairs.
The near-disaster at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979 focused attention anew on the importance of designing controls, operating procedures and jobs to match, not overwhelm, human ability.
But it has been the invasion of homes and workplaces by the personal computer that has done the most to fuel interest in human factors as a profession--prompting a more than doubling, for instance, of membership in the Santa Monica-based Human Factors Society to about 4,500 since 1977.
“More and more people are involved in using technology, and those are all opportunities for people to work on the usability and the safety of those technologies,” said the society’s president, John D. Gould, a psychologist at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
In Southern California, defense industries remain a major center of human factors activities. Human factors engineers at Integrated Systems Research in Woodland Hills, for instance, designed the displays for a computerized drug interdiction system at March Air Force Base in Riverside County.
The firm has also developed an “electronic clipboard,” a handheld personal computer designed so all human contact with the device--”user interface,” in human factors jargon--is by means of touching images on a screen, rather than tapping messages on a keyboard.
While now in use only by the military to record observations about tests or maneuvers, the clipboard concept has the potential for use by everyone from insurance adjusters gathering information in the field to nurses charting the readouts of an array of high-tech medical instruments, said Michael G. Samet, Integrated Systems’ chief operating officer.
“It’s a challenging problem--to help people (gather) that information,” Samet said. “It’s got to be done in a way with as few errors and as fast and efficiently as one does it manually.”
Los Angeles also is the spawning ground of a new subfield of human factors. “Macroergonomics”--the preoccupation of the human factors department at USC’s Insitute of Safety and Systems Management--extends beyond the design of individual jobs or devices to study the best ways to design human activities, such as industrial plants, that make heavy use of technology.
Najmedin Meshkati, an assistant professor in the department, has used human factors principles to study the deadly chemical plant leak 3 1/2 years ago in Bhopal, India. His conclusion: A disaster widely blamed on human error should instead have been attributed to a faulty relationship between people and machines.
“The operations at the Bhopal plant could literally be characterized as a group of untrained and unprepared operators, working with an unsafe technology in an unkind working environment, using unfriendly hardware and unreliable instrumentation, being assembled in an unorganized facility and supervised by unseasoned managers,” Meshkati says in a soon-to-be-published study.
“Error,” he explained in an interview, “is the result of a mismatch between the human and the task.”
The human factors issues most companies face in the course of day-to-day business, naturally, are more pedantic.
Ergonomics experts at Liberty Mutual, the nation’s largest writer of worker’s compensation insurance, spend much of their time helping firms redesign factory and warehouse tasks to reduce the likelihood of lower back injuries, wrist strain and other muscular ailments.
At one Los Angeles-area glass manufacturing company where many workers complained of wrist injuries from a monotonous glass-etching task, Liberty Mutual persuaded managers to schedule hourly rest breaks, said George E. Brogmus, senior loss prevention consultant in the firm’s Woodland Hills office.
Injuries declined, he said. And the workers’ productivity increased, even though they were working fewer minutes each hour.
“You have to realize that people have limitations and they have capabilities,” said Brogmus, underscoring a key principle in human factors. “If you exceed those capabilities, you really haven’t designed an optimal workplace.”
In the past decade, office workers have drawn a steadily increasing share of ergonomists’ attention.
As concerns rose about the health effects of working with computers, human factors experts in computer companies developed keyboards and screens that could ease wrist and eye strain. Furniture makers created chairs and work stations that could be adjusted to meet individual postural needs. And a handful of consultants took on the job of advising firms on ways to make their offices more ergonomically sound.
Less visible to the average office worker has been the human factors expertise being brought to bear on the inner workings of their computers.
While such top computer manufacturers as IBM, Digital Equipment and Xerox long have had staffs of ergonomists, many leading software developers--such as Torrance-based Ashton-Tate--only lately have begun hiring human factors experts in hopes of making their products more accessible to typical users.
The trend is inspired by the success of systems like Apple’s Macintosh, which elevates “user friendliness” to new heights by skirting computerese and putting sophisticated computing skills in the hands of anyone who can manipulate a pointing device called a “mouse” to select tasks from a screen.
“We can design from the human standpoint rather than from the standpoint of the inside of the computer,” explained Thomas S. Tullis, a psychologist who recently left McDonnell Douglas’ space station team in Huntington Beach to join Ashton-Tate as a user-interface researcher. Software firms, he said, “now are realizing there are people out there specifically trained to investigate these issues.”
While software companies may be counting on ergonomists to rescue them from irrelevance, Wichansky, at Hewlett-Packard, says human factors experts should not expect to be recognized as the heroes of the computer age.
“The definition of our doing a good job,” she said, “is that no one will notice.”
