The Ergonomics Society--the Society Lectures 1999: the next 50 years: future challenges and opportunities for empathy in our science

To stay relevant and applicable in a rapidly changing world, ergonomics must meet several challenges. The paper explores these challenges and how the profession might respond. It is proposed that there are opportunities, and a need, to embrace empathy as a legitimate and useful tool. Empathy has value in three main areas. In research we can broaden our understanding of people and situations, learning 'why' as well as 'how and what' people do. Second, by identifying with the emotional as well as intellectual concerns of sponsors and colleagues from other professions, we inspire trust and confidence, adding value to our collective efforts in collaborative work. Third, through methods such as role-playing and story telling, empathy is a powerful tool for getting ergonomics issues across to implementers and influencing outcomes. Care is needed to balance empathy with systematic observation in the tradition of the scientific method; the power of empathy is in combining it with objective methods to make full use of our abilities as human scientists.     

Doing ‘organizational work’: Expanding the conception of professional practice in ergonomics

Literature on ergonomic practice contains many discussions of how ergonomists should work but far less attention has been paid to how they do work and the factors that influence their practice. In an effort to improve our understanding of ergonomic practice as it occurs and how it is conditioned by broader contexts, we conducted an interview study with 21 ergonomists in Canada. We were particularly interested to understand the different kinds of activities study participants engaged in during the course of their work, the challenges they faced and the strategies they employed for facing these challenges. Findings indicate that in the course of their professional practice ergonomists engage in a variety of types of activities. This includes consulting on risk factors as well as a proactive role of fostering the application of ergonomics in organizations. The process of advocating for ergonomics brought study participants into a variety of interactions and collaborations with workplace parties in a type of activity we have called “organizational work”. In the course of doing organizational work, ergonomists utilize different strategies, including “political manoeuvring”, tailoring data collection and report presentations to clients’ concerns and ‘goal hooking’ in order to make the case for implementing ergonomics in workplaces. The article concludes with a list of “tips” for practicing ergonomists that are suggested by the analysis.     

State of Science: ergonomics and global issues

In his 1993 IEA keynote address, Neville Moray urged the ergonomics discipline to face up to the global problems facing humanity and consider how ergonomics might help find some of the solutions. In this State of Science article we critically evaluate what the ergonomics discipline has achieved in the last two and a half decades to help create a secure future for humanity. Moray’s challenges for ergonomics included deriving a value structure that moves us beyond a Westernised view of worker-organisation-technology fit, taking a multidisciplinary approach which engages with other social and biological sciences, considering the gross cross-cultural factors that determine how different societies function, paying more attention to mindful consumption, and embracing the complexity of our interconnected world. This article takes a socio-historical approach by considering the factors that influence what has been achieved since Moray’s keynote address. We conclude with our own set of predictions for the future and priorities for addressing the challenges that we are likely to face.

Practitioner Summary: We critically reflect on what has been achieved by the ergonomics profession in addressing the global challenges raised by Moray's 1993 keynote address to the International Ergonomics Association. Apart from healthcare, the response has largely been weak and disorganised. We make suggestions for priority research and practice that is required to facilitate a sustainable future for humanity.     

Engineering aesthetics and aesthetic ergonomics: Theoretical foundations and a dual-process research methodology

Although industrial and product designers are keenly aware of the importance of design aesthetics, they make aesthetic design decisions largely on the basis of their intuitive judgments and ‘educated guesses’. Whilst ergonomics and human factors researchers have made great contributions to the safety, productivity, ease-of-use, and comfort of human-machine-environment systems, aesthetics is largely ignored as a topic of systematic scientific research in human factors and ergonomics. This article discusses the need for incorporating the aesthetics dimension in ergonomics and proposes the establishment of a new scientific and engineering discipline that we can call ‘engineering aesthetics’. This discipline addresses two major questions: How do we use engineering and scientific methods to study aesthetics concepts in general and design aesthetics in particular? How do we incorporate engineering and scientific methods in the aesthetic design and evaluation process? This article identifies two special features that distinguish aesthetic appraisal of products and system designs from aesthetic appreciation of art, and lays out a theoretical foundation as well as a dual-process research methodology for ‘engineering aesthetics’. Sample applications of this methodology are also described.     

Green ergonomics: definition and scope

This paper demonstrates that the goals of ergonomics (i.e. effectiveness, efficiency, health, safety and usability) are closely aligned with the goals of design for environmental sustainability. In this paper, the term ‘green ergonomics’ is conceptualised to specifically describe ergonomics interventions with a pro-nature emphasis. Green ergonomics is focused on the bi-directional connections between human systems and nature. This involves looking at (1) how ergonomics design and evaluation might be used to conserve, preserve, and restore nature and (2) how ecosystem services might be harnessed to facilitate the improved wellbeing and effectiveness of human systems. The paper proposes the scope of green ergonomics based on these bi-directional relationships in the areas of the design of low resource systems and products, the design of green jobs, and the design for behaviour change. Suggestions for further work in the green ergonomics domain are also made.

Practitioner Summary: Given the enormous environmental challenges facing modern industrial society, this paper encourages ergonomics science to embrace a pro-nature understanding of work design and research. This paper sets out the role for green ergonomics based on an appreciation of the human–nature connections that have been integrated with our understanding of ergonomics science and practice.     

Do we need sustainability as a new approach in human factors and ergonomics?

The International Ergonomics Association Technical Committee ‘Human Factors and Sustainable Development’ was established to contribute to a broad discourse about opportunities and risks resulting from current societal ‘mega-trends’ and their impacts on the interactions among humans and other elements of a system, e.g. in work systems. This paper focuses on the underlying key issues: how do the sustainability paradigm and human factors/ergonomics interplay and interact, and is sustainability necessary as a new approach for our discipline? Based on a discussion of the sustainability concept, some general principles for designing new and enhancing existent approaches of human factors and ergonomics regarding their orientation towards sustainability are proposed.

Practitioner summary: The increasing profile of sustainability on the international stage presents new opportunities for human factors/ergonomics. Positioning of the sustainability paradigm within human factors/ergonomics is discussed. Approaches to incorporating sustainability in the design of work systems are considered.     

Translating concepts of complexity to the field of ergonomics

Since 1958 more than 80 journal papers from the mainstream ergonomics literature have used either the words ‘complex’ or ‘complexity’ in their titles. Of those, more than 90% have been published in only the past 20 years. This observation communicates something interesting about the way in which contemporary ergonomics problems are being understood. The study of complexity itself derives from non-linear mathematics but many of its core concepts have found analogies in numerous non-mathematical domains. Set against this cross-disciplinary background, the current paper aims to provide a similar initial mapping to the field of ergonomics. In it, the ergonomics problem space, complexity metrics and powerful concepts such as emergence raise complexity to the status of an important contingency factor in achieving a match between ergonomics problems and ergonomics methods. The concept of relative predictive efficiency is used to illustrate how this match could be achieved in practice. What is clear overall is that a major source of, and solution to, complexity are the humans in systems. Understanding complexity on its own terms offers the potential to leverage disproportionate effects from ergonomics interventions and to tighten up the often loose usage of the term in the titles of ergonomics papers.

Statement of Relevance: This paper reviews and discusses concepts from the study of complexity and maps them to ergonomics problems and methods. It concludes that humans are a major source of and solution to complexity in systems and that complexity is a powerful contingency factor, which should be considered to ensure that ergonomics approaches match the true nature of ergonomics problems.     

Green ergonomics: challenges and opportunities

Addressing the causes and consequences of environmental degradation presents significant challenges for humankind. This paper considers what ergonomics/human factors (E/HF) professionals can contribute to understanding and tackling some of the issues that arise through the movement towards a more environmentally sustainable economy. These issues are considered in relation to work in green industries (specifically, sustainable energy production, recycling and organic food production), and there is a need to ensure that these jobs are safe and healthy; the design of products and systems that are ‘environmentally friendly’ to facilitate their acceptability and use and how E/HF professionals can contribute to understanding and promoting behavioural change relating to environmental choices. The activities of some international organisations in this area are identified and the potential for E/HF involvement is considered. The implications for the E/HF profession are discussed.

Practitioner summary: This paper considers how ergonomics/human factors professionals can contribute to the movement towards more sustainable and ‘environmentally friendly’ design and work. Potential challenges and opportunities are discussed in relation to jobs in green industries, products and systems and behaviour change.     

A reflexive analysis of ‘context’ in privacy research: Two case studies in HIV care

Privacy is a much discussed and politically charged topic in contemporary healthcare. Yet, studying the actual privacy practices of healthcare professionals and patients remains extremely challenging. In this paper we reflect on our experiences using qualitative methods in two projects on HIV care, the first researching internet use by a particular group of patients, and the second looking at issues of information technology integration in hospitals. Our aim in doing so is to highlight some of the opportunities and challenges involved in including an explicit focus on ‘context’ in qualitative privacy research in healthcare. We suggest that adopting a more reflexive approach to the way methods are used in relation to ‘context’ in privacy-related HCI research provides opportunities for understanding how different ‘privacy contexts’ are enacted in and through our research practices in different environments.     

Ergonomics action research I: shifting from hypothesis testing to experiential learning

This paper presents the case for the need for ‘Action Research’ (AR) approaches to gain understanding of how ergonomics considerations can best be integrated into the design of new work systems. The AR researchers work collaboratively with other stakeholders to solve a real-world problem: gaining insight into the problem and factors influencing solution building from an embedded position in the development process. This experience is interpreted in terms of available theory and can support further theory development. This non-experimental approach can help provide practical new approaches for integrating ergonomics considerations into real work system design processes. The AR approach suffers from a lack of acceptance by conventionally trained scientists. This paper aims to help overcome this weakness by developing the underlying theory and rationale for using AR approaches in ergonomics research. We propose further development of hybrid approaches which incorporate other evaluation techniques to extend the knowledge gains from AR projects.

Practitioner Summary: Researchers should engage directly with organisations in ergonomics projects so that they can better understand the challenges and needs of practitioners who are trying to apply available scientific knowledge in their own unique context. Such ‘Action Research’ could help develop theory and approaches useful to improve mobilisation and application of ergonomics knowledge in organisations.     

A novel method for personalized music recommendation

With the development of digital music technologies, it is an interesting and useful issue to recommend the ‘favored music’ from large amounts of digital music. Some Web-based music stores can recommend popular music which has been rated by many people. However, three problems that need to be resolved in the current methods are: (a) how to recommend the ‘favored music’ which has not been rated by anyone, (b) how to avoid repeatedly recommending the ‘disfavored music’ for users, and (c) how to recommend more interesting music for users besides the ones users have been used to listen. To achieve these goals, we proposed a novel method called personalized hybrid music recommendation, which combines the content-based, collaboration-based and emotion-based methods by computing the weights of the methods according to users’ interests. Furthermore, to evaluate the recommendation accuracy, we constructed a system that can recommend the music to users after mining users’ logs on music listening records. By the feedback of the user’s options, the proposed methods accommodate the variations of the users’ musical interests and then promptly recommend the favored and more interesting music via consecutive recommendations. Experimental results show that the recommendation accuracy achieved by our method is as good as 90%. Hence, it is helpful for recommending the ‘favored music’ to users, provided that each music object is annotated with the related music emotions. The framework in this paper could serve as a useful basis for studies on music recommendation.     

Cognitive ergonomics: it's all in the mind

In this paper a distinction is made between classical ergonomics as dealing with the quality of working and cognitive ergonomics as dealing with the quality of work including the joint system products. It is argued that classical ergonomics can be seen as embracing a dualism, where the effects of work on the body are considered separately from the effects of work on the mind. This continues the mechanistic tradition of Western psychology. The aim of cognitive ergonomics is to describe (1) how work affects the mind, as well as (2) how the mind affects work. Work is all in the mind in the sense that the quality of work depends on the person's understanding of the situation (goals, means, constraints) and in the sense that the design of a worksystem depends on the designer's understanding, in particular the conceptualization of the people in the system. In cognitive ergonomics, the reliability of performance—and in particular the reliability of cognition—become central issues. The differences between classical and cognitive ergonomics are illustrated by considering two typical areas: risks at work and human-computer interaction. It is concluded that classical and cognitive ergonomics represent two complementary views of work that must be combined to meet the challenges of present day work environments.     

Distributed ontology building as practical work

Ontologies – a form of structured and logically related knowledge or classification hierarchy embedded in a computer system – are regarded by many scientists as having enormous promise for the consistent use and re-use of data. To realise this promise, however, is not straightforward. In this paper, based on ethnographic observation, we argue that the challenges for ontology building are ‘social’ as much as they are technical. By this we mean the routine work undertaken in the building process and the problems and difficulties entailed can be understood in terms of the practices of knowledge workers and the practical nature of ‘sorting things out’. Getting a better sense of how, in practise, this work gets done gives a sense of the main challenges of building successful ontologies and how this impacts on the design of tool support. In considering the practices of one group in particular, we try to show how, for members, the technical problems of determining what classification structure is appropriate, and what its boundaries might be, depend substantially on assumptions about the ‘community’ and its interests and purposes. This ‘turn to the social’ has ramifications for the understanding of ontology building and use. Specifically, ‘modelling’ approaches to ontology building tell us little about the practical organisation of the work and how this relates to the prospect of successful sharing. Ethnographic enquiry may reveal important issues that are otherwise missed.     

Ergonomics in the past and the future: from a German perspective to an international one

Looking at the past there are more or less fragmented approaches in ergonomics as well as in management. Especially in Germany, the ‘Lean Management wave’ weakened ergonomics in industry. On the other hand, there is a growing demand for holistic concepts—and ergonomics can by definition be understood as holistic. Many of the newer approaches in management include ODAM or macroergonomics elements. In building up a stronger relationship between macro- and micro-ergonomics, the whole discipline could be promoted. This also requires the fulfilment of some preconditions like systematically gathering and presenting ‘best practices’, which show that ergonomics pays off.     

A comparison of empathic communication pattern for teenagers and older people in online support communities

This article reports a study that investigated the occurrences of empathy in online support communities for teenagers. Qualitative content analysis with 400 messages from a discussion board about depression was used to identify how empathy was expressed in the specific online communication. Emphasis was also placed on the comparison of this age group to older people, by comparing the results with those from a previous study on empathy in an online support community about depression for older people. Specifically, the analysis focused on the frequencies of the categories of the code scheme, linguistic characteristics of the communication content, the occurring components of empathy, and the roles as well as activities of the members. From our analysis, we concluded that young people exchanged a substantial amount of empathic emotional communication when participating in an online support community, and they communicated on a more personal level compared to older people, who tended to engage in a more formal communication. In addition, teenagers also showed a high level of understanding but lower level of concern compared to older persons when expressing empathy online.     

The field becomes the laboratory? The impact of the contextual digital footprint on the discipline of E/HF

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of affordable digital sensors, ubiquitous networking and computation puts us at what is only the start of a new era in terms of the volume, coverage and granularity of data that we can access about individuals and workplaces. This paper examines the consequences of harnessing this data deluge for the practice of E/HF. Focusing on what we term the ‘contextual digital footprint’, the trail of data we produce through interactions with many different digital systems over the course of even a single day, we describe three example scenarios (drawn from health care, distributed work and transportation) and examine how access to data directly drawn in considerable volume from the field will potentially change our application of design and evaluation methods. We conclude with a discussion of issues relevant to ethical and professional practice within this new environment including the increased challenges of respecting anonymity, working with n = all data-sets and the central role of ergonomists in promulgating positive uses of data while retaining a systems-based humanistic approach to work design.

Practitioner summary: The paper envisions the impact of new and emerging sources of data about people and workplaces upon future practice in E/HF. We identify practical consequences for ergonomics practice, highlight new areas of professional competence likely to be required and flag both the risks and benefits of adopting a more data-driven approach.     

Reflections on 25 Years of Ethnography in CSCW

In this article we focus attention on ethnography’s place in CSCW by reflecting on how ethnography in the context of CSCW has contributed to our understanding of the sociality and materiality of work and by exploring how the notion of the ‘field site’ as a construct in ethnography provides new ways of conceptualizing ‘work’ that extends beyond the workplace. We argue that the well known challenges of drawing design implications from ethnographic research have led to useful strategies for tightly coupling ethnography and design. We also offer some thoughts on recent controversies over what constitutes useful and proper ethnographic research in the context of CSCW. Finally, we argue that as the temporal and spatial horizons of inquiry have expanded, along with new domains of collaborative activity, ethnography continues to provide invaluable perspectives.     

Doing ‘organizational work’: Expanding the conception of professional practice in ergonomics

Literature on ergonomic practice contains many discussions of how ergonomists should work but far less attention has been paid to how they do work and the factors that influence their practice. In an effort to improve our understanding of ergonomic practice as it occurs and how it is conditioned by broader contexts, we conducted an interview study with 21 ergonomists in Canada. We were particularly interested to understand the different kinds of activities study participants engaged in during the course of their work, the challenges they faced and the strategies they employed for facing these challenges. Findings indicate that in the course of their professional practice ergonomists engage in a variety of types of activities. This includes consulting on risk factors as well as a proactive role of fostering the application of ergonomics in organizations. The process of advocating for ergonomics brought study participants into a variety of interactions and collaborations with workplace parties in a type of activity we have called “organizational work”. In the course of doing organizational work, ergonomists utilize different strategies, including “political manoeuvring”, tailoring data collection and report presentations to clients’ concerns and ‘goal hooking’ in order to make the case for implementing ergonomics in workplaces. The article concludes with a list of “tips” for practicing ergonomists that are suggested by the analysis.     

Are online discussions enough to constitute communities of practice in professional domain? A case study of ergonomics’ practice in France

The goal of our research is to characterise how online discussions may provide support to the construction of a Virtual Community of Practice, as a way to develop a profession. To do so, we investigate the functions (sharing information, resources or experience) and the nature of knowledge (e.g. methodology and trends of ergonomics) exchanged on Ergoliste, a French-speaking online mailing list dedicated to ergonomics, as well as the status of participants. Our results reveal that the list has both informative and formative functions as it deals with sharing/seeking information, resources and experience, mainly between experts and novices in ergonomics, exchanging about situated and circumstantiated aspects of practices. Finally, these results are complemented by interviews with list participants which on the one hand confirm the main functions of the list and, on the other hand, reveal divergence in the perception that list participants belonging to a “community” structured only around this list. This research opens some prospects for more longitudinal investigations of the contents of the list, to analyse more deeply how the list can be viewed as an efficient tool to co-elaborate knowledge about ergonomics and its development.