Ergonomics Article – Designer Magazine

Well, it’s finally arrived – all of our hard work over the last year or so has paid off, and the Ergonomics: Real Design exhibition at London’s Design Museum is now open.

There was a media preview last Tuesday, which generated us some excellent coverage on the BBC and in The Independent, as well as several popular design magazines. Then it opened to the public on Wednesday, and by all accounts the feedback is good, and people are engaging with the exhibition as we hoped.

Last night was the big fanfare though – the Ergonomics Society (now officially known as the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors) held a private VIP reception for over 100 people, which – in my humble opinion – went down very well indeed. There was certainly a real buzz about the place, and for me it really brought it home that the exhibition had really happened. I think until I saw people actually going round it, it hadn’t quite sunk in with me. All very exciting.

I must say thanks again to everyone who pulled together to make it happen – Fergus, Gemma, Margaret, Laura, Roger, Colin, and of course Reg, who got the ball rolling in the first place and has stuck with the project all the way through. Finally, a nod to the sponsors, the EPSRC, who are evidently quite pleased with it as it’s currently featuring on the front page of their website too.

For more info, see the Design Museum’s website.

The first was the British Science Association’s Science Communication Conference, an excellent event with a star-studded list of presenters, including Lord Professor Robert Winston, Professor Kathy Sykes, and Professor Jim Al-Khalili. One of the key principles of this whole area is that we (as scientists) don’t just sit in our ivory towers and assume everyone’s stupid and that we have to teach them. Science Communication is a two-way process, and actually most (non-scientist) people are starting from a baseline with a bit of knowledge about a lot of things.

This is something I think wholeheartedly applies to ergonomics. In fact, most people are amateur ergonomists – everyone knows, on some level, when they’ve used a product or system that has been well (or badly) designed. A lot of them would have a good idea of how they want it fixed, too. I mean, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? A human-centred design process starts with identifying the users’ needs, and who best to tell us about them? So the only problem, as far as I see it, is that these amateur ergonomists just don’t call it ergonomics – and consequently might not think to turn to ‘professional’ ergonomists or The Ergonomics Society.

And that brings me onto my second point – which was inspired by discussions at The Ergonomics Society’s awayday, where Council met up to discuss our vision and strategy for the future. The old ‘ergonomically designed product’ chestnut was rolled out (which I’ve blogged on before – and will come back to later), and that set my train of thought off on armchair ergonomists again. Because it’s about understanding what ergonomics is really about – so not only are people sometimes acting as ergonomists without knowing it, they’re also being sold a perception of ergonomics which is inaccurate.

There’s a great little anecdote from our experience at Cheltenham which illustrates this nicely. I got talking to a little girl and her family about our stand and what ergonomics is all about, and they told me a story about a design exercise the girl did at school recently, to design a pencil that’s easier to use for people. She explained how she made it slightly bigger so it’s easier to hold, shaped for the hand, and grip areas for the fingers. I told her she was being an ergonomist without even realising it! The best bit was that she refrained from just putting a bit of rubber on the pencil…

Craik was a psychologist who did his most profound work during the Second World War, and as Rob explained, was really ahead of his time in coming up with ergonomics issues and theories that we’re still working with today. And remember that this is a good 5-10 years before the formation of the Ergonomics Research Society (now The Ergonomics Society) in 1949.

There were many gems in Craik’s work that stood out for me, not least of all his exposition of the systems approach as necessary to understand the interplay between human and machine. For me, as someone still (relatively!) early in his career, this was a bit of a revelation as I always thought that systems thinking was a relatively recent approach – it’s certainly only just getting into the minds of road safety experts (see the Department for Transport’s recent consultation - I’ll come back to this another time).

The other one that really hit me was how – as Rob explained it – Craik saw ergonomics as a means of genetic modification in design evolution. In other words, we can’t wait for design to evolve out the bad genes, as there’s too much at stake – we have to accelerate the process. This is a lovely turnaround from what I often teach my students, in that technology and design are nowadays evolving so quickly that they’re outpacing the human ability to keep up.