Ergonomics

The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error

When faced with a human error problem, you may be tempted to ask 'Why didn't they watch out better? How could they not have noticed?'. You think you can solve your human error problem by telling people to be more careful, by reprimanding the miscreants, by issuing a new rule or procedure. These are all expressions of 'The Bad Apple Theory', where you believe your system is basically safe if it were not for those few unreliable people in it. This old view of human error is increasingly outdated and will lead you nowhere. The new view, in contrast, understands that a human error problem is actually an organizational problem. Finding a 'human error' by any other name, or by any other human, is only the beginning of your journey, not a convenient conclusion. The new view recognizes that systems are inherent trade-offs between safety and other pressures (for example: production). People need to create safety through practice, at all levels of an organization. Breaking new ground beyond its successful predecessor, "The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error" guides you through the traps and misconceptions of the old view. It explains how to avoid the hindsight bias, to zoom out from the people closest in time and place to the mishap, and resist the temptation of counterfactual reasoning and judgmental language. But it also helps you look forward. It suggests how to apply the new view in building your safety department, handling questions about accountability, and constructing meaningful countermeasures. It even helps you in getting your organization to adopt the new view and improve its learning from failure. So if you are faced by a human error problem, abandon the fallacy of a quick fix. Read this book.

The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things

The Measure of Man and Woman: Human Factors in Design

Human factors research impacts everything from the height of kitchen counters to the placement of automobile pedals to a book's type size. And in this updated and expanded version of the original landmark work, you'll find the research information necessary to create designs that better accommodate human need. Featuring more than 200 anthropometric drawings, this handbook is filled with all of the essential measurements of the human body and its relationship to the designed environment. You'll also discover guidelines for designing for children and the elderly, for the digital workplace, and for ADA compliance. Measurements are in both English and metric units.

The Limits of Expertise: Rethinking Pilot Error and the Causes of Airline Accidents

"The Limits of Expertise" reports a study of the 19 major U.S. airline accidents from 1991-2000 in which the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found crew error to be a causal factor. Each accident is reported in a separate chapter that examines events and crew actions and explores the cognitive processes in play at each step. The majority of all aviation accidents are attributed to human error, but this is often misinterpreted as evidence of lack of skill, vigilance, or conscientiousness of the pilots. Why would highly skilled, well-trained pilots make errors performing tasks they had successfully executed many thousands of times in previous flights? The approach is guided by extensive evidence from cognitive psychology that human skill and error are opposite sides of the same coin. The book examines the ways in which competing task demands, ambiguity and organizational pressures interact with cognitive processes to make all experts vulnerable to characteristic forms of error. The final chapter identifies themes cutting across the accidents, discusses the role of chance, criticizes simplistic concepts of causality of accidents, and suggests ways to reduce vulnerability to these catastrophes. The authors' complementary experience allowed a unique approach to the study: accident investigation with the NTSB, cognitive psychology research both in the lab and in the field, enormous first-hand experience of piloting, and application of aviation psychology in both civil and military operations. This combination allowed the authors to examine and explain the domain-specific aspects of aviation operations and to extend advances in basic research in cognition to complex issues of human performance in the real world. Although "The Limits of Expertise" is directed to aviation operations, the implications are clear for understanding the decision processes, skilled performance and errors of professionals in many domains, including medicine.

Human Factors in Flight

This work offers an assessment and analysis of the way in which human factors function in the flight situation, with regard to pilots and aircraft staff. The author was formerly the Human Factors Consultant to KLM.

Practice Dentistry Pain-Free: Evidence-based Ergonomic Strategies to Prevent Pain and Extend Your Career

Two out of three dental professionals experience work related pain that can easily progress to an injury or early retirement. In her groundbreaking new book, Valachi has taken the problem of work related pain in dentistry and distilled it into the basic whys and hows that are imperative to effective injury prevention and treatment. Solidly backed with over 300 scientific references, this comprehensive wellness guide bridges the gap between occupational pain and dental ergonomics by offering effective, evidence based interventions. Specially developed for dentists, hygienists, assistants, faculty, students and front office, the book is written in a user friendly format, with over 100 illustrations. Special chapters on low back, neck, shoulder and hand pain explain how the most common pain syndromes develop in dentistry, and offer specific intervention strategies. Two chapters delve extensively into dental ergonomic equipment selection and adjustment, and the exercise chapter offers key exercises that help prevent painful muscle imbalances. A helpful Resources section at the end of the book, provides readers with additional ergonomic resources and contact information. Health care professional who treat dental professionals will find the book invaluable for helping to alleviate chronic pain syndromes.

Ergonomics and the Management of Musculoskeletal Disorders

This comprehensive resource provides a strong medical, ergonomic, and industrial foundation for understanding and managing musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) in business and industry. Addressing multiple perspectives - including the individual worker, insurance companies, regulatory agencies, industry, and the medical community, this practical text provides an integrated approach to understanding and management of these conditions. Well-referenced and highly organized, it follows a logical progression that moves from presenting a broad background on the historical and present day phenomena of MSDs, to explanation of the multiple risk factors involved with MSDs, including physiologic, biomechanical, and psychosocial factors.

• A strong physiologic, biomechanical, and psychological basis for understanding work-related MSDs is provided.
• A thorough review of medical conditions associated with work-related MSDs is included because they directly affect analysis, assessment, and treatment of MSDs.
• Actual work-related MSD programs for high-risk industries and populations are presented.
• A sophisticated outcome assessment model for work-related MSDs provides a practical approach for therapists to use when assessing patients.
• Content is well organized, beginning with a discussion of the various professional perspectives of those involved with treating work-related MSDs, then addressing the medical diagnosis and treatment, the ergonomic analysis and intervention, and cost-benefit analyses.
• Extensive referencing throughout provides an evidence-based approach for analysis and treatment of work-related MSDs.
• A comprehensive discussion is included on the risk factors that contribute to work-related MSDs.
• A panel of highly recognizable contributors provides expertise so readers can get first hand knowledge from the pros.
• Content covers home and leisure as well as work-related MSDs to help readers understand how to treat special situations, such as geriatrics, children, and the home.
• The structure of the book is set up in a logical and easy-to-read manner that offers a client-centered approach as well as a systems perspective on the management of MSDs using a variety of modalities.

• Each chapter has been completely updated with extensive references to the history of work, latest
  research on biomechanical and psychosocial risk factors for MSDs, latest ergonomic assessment tools (including EMGs), treatment of MSDs, and regulatory information.
• Several groundbreaking chapters have been added - The Expanded Definition of Ergonomics, Joint-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders, Ergonomics of Caring for Children, Ergonomics in the Home, and Management of the Older Worker.

Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives)

This book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on recent scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.

This book provides a new way of understanding how human actions and technological artifacts are intertwined. The author shows how leading edge technologies can rest on very old-fashioned assumptions, while more modest initiatives suggest innovative approaches to technology design and use.

Introduction to Human Factors Engineering (2nd Edition)

This book describes the capabilities and limitations of the human operator—both physical and mental—and how these should be used to guide the design of systems with which people interact. General principles of human-system interaction and design are presented, and included are specific examples of successful and unsuccessful interactions. It links theories of human performance that underlie the principles with real-world experience, without a heavy engineering-oriented perspective. Topics include design and evaluation methods; different systems such as visual, auditory, tactile, vestibular, automated, and transportation; cognition, decision-making, and aesthetics; physiology; and stress, safety, accidents, and human error. An excellent reference for personnel and managers in the workplace.

The Psychology Of Everyday Things

With the many recent advances in technology, it seems, there has followed a diminution of quality. Electronic books have several advantages over their print counterparts, for instance. But for the time being, they're hard to use and unattractive to boot. Computers, which are supposed to make our lives easier, are commonly sources of frustration and wasted time. Movies are wondrously chock-a-block with special effects--but someone forgot the story. And so on.

Donald Norman, a retired professor of cognitive science, is bothered to no end by the fact that grappling with unfriendly objects now takes up so many of our hours. Over the course of several books, of which The Psychology of Everyday Things was the first, he has railed against bad design. He scrutinizes a range of artifacts that are supposed to make our daily living a little easier, and he finds most of them wanting. Why, he asks, does a door need instructions that say "push" or "pull"? A well-designed object, he argues, is self-explanatory. But well-designed objects are increasingly rare, for the present culture places a higher value on aesthetics than utility, even with such items as cordless screwdrivers, dresser drawers, and kitchen cabinets. In their concern for creating "art," many designers don't seem to consider what people actually do with things. Such disregard, Norman suggests, leads to few objects being standardized: think of all the different kinds of unsynchronized clocks that lurk in microwave ovens, VCRs, coffee makers, and the like--and of all the different kinds of batteries needed to drive them. Why, he wonders, must we reset all those clocks whenever the power goes off? Some designer somewhere, he ventures, ought to develop a master clock that communicates with all other electric clocks in a home--one that, when reset, synchronizes its slave units.

You don't need to be especially interested in technological matters to enjoy Norman's arguments. The book's underlying question is aimed at a global audience: will the design of everyday things improve? If this entertaining and, yes, well-designed book changes even a few minds, perhaps it will. --Gregory McNamee

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this fascinating, ingenious--even liberating--book, lies not in pourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology.

The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The book presents examples aplenty--among them, the VCR, computer, and office telephone, all models of how not to design for people.

But good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. But the designer must care.

The author is a world-famous psychologist and pioneer in the application of cognitive science. His aim is to raise the consciousness of both consumers and designers to the delights of products that are easy to use and understand.

New edition has slightly different title: "The Design of Everyday Things" (ISBN: 0385267746).