Elsevier

Applied Ergonomics

Volume 45, Issue 1, January 2014, Pages 40-44
Applied Ergonomics

Human factors/ergonomics as a systems discipline? “The human use of human beings” revisited

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.024Get rights and content

Highlights

  • HFE is today facing work environments that did not exist at its inception.

  • It is therefore necessary critically to assess the built-in assumptions and traditions.

  • In today's work environments, effective solutions depend on coping rather than design.

  • HFE should contribute to the ability to manage expected as well as unexpected work situations.

  • HFE competence (methods and theories) should correspond to the world of today and tomorrow, rather than the world of yesterday.

Abstract

Discussions of the possible future of Human factors/ergonomics (HFE) usually take the past for granted in the sense that the future of HFE is assumed to be more of the same. This paper argues that the nature of work in the early 2010s is so different from the nature of work when HFE was formulated 60–70 years ago that a critical reassessment of the basis for HFE is needed. If HFE should be a systems discipline, it should be a soft systems rather than a hard systems discipline. It is not enough for HFE to seek to improve performance and well-being through systems design, since any change to the work environment in principle alters the very basis for the change. Instead HFE should try to anticipate how the nature of work will change so that it can both foresee what work will be and propose what work should be.

Section snippets

The quandary

In 2010 the International Ergonomics Association (IEA) put together a small working group to address the questions of how human factors/ergonomics (HFE) should best maintain and strengthen its discipline and profession. The main issues of the discussion were: (1) how to characterise the core of HFE – how to describe that which presumably distinguishes it as a field of science; (2) how best to attract people – students, researchers, and practitioners – into the field at all levels; and (3) how

The history

In order to understand the future of HFE, we must understand the past. The background for HFE was the need to find solutions to some practical problems. The problems were characteristic of the nature of work at the time – the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Since the nature of work in the 2010, one hundred years later, is significantly different, it is only reasonable to consider whether the traditional formulations of the problems – and a forteriori also the solutions –

The traditional approach

The rest of this chapter will consider some issues raised in the paper by Dul et al. (2012) in the light of the above, in particular the suggestion that HFE should be seen as a systems science. The reason is that the issues presented by the paper represent widely shared views in the HFE community and that these views require some discussion.

Any such discussion must be based on a common understanding of what the subject of discussion is, in this case an understanding of what HFE is. To manage

A strategy for HFE

In the established HFE perspective, the goal of HFE is to “improve performance and well-being through systems design”, as noted above. At first glance this seems entirely reasonable. The performance is, presumably, related to the output or product of work, referring to such issues as quality, efficiency, or safety. We all work to produce something – tangible outputs in some cases and intangible outputs in other cases – and unless there is a ‘market’ for what we produce, taking the term ‘market’

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