Designer Magazine (http://www.thedesignermagazine.com) has just published an extensive feature on the Ergonomics – Real Design Exhibition featuring an interview with the project lead Dr Mark Young.
Posts Tagged ‘The Ergonomics Society’
Article on Ergonomics Real Design Exhibition in Designer Magazine
Thursday, December 17th, 2009Ergonomics Society Annual Lecture
Friday, May 22nd, 2009On Tuesday evening this week I had the pleasure of attending the Ergonomics Society Annual Lecture, given by Professor Rob Stammers of the University of Leicester, on ‘Kenneth Craik: a progenitor for ergonomics’. It was at the Royal Society of Arts, just off the Strand in London – a prestigious venue with very nice hospitality beforehand!
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.
Creating a Monster
Sunday, May 17th, 2009It’s been a busy week in the workshops at Brunel University this week, putting together the basic structure of the exhibition stand that we are planning to take to the Cheltenham Science Festival in the first week of June. More details to follow in due course about the content and interactive elements of the stand which will be being manned by volunteers from The Ergonomics Society.
The Stand Ready for Action (photo Fergus Bisset)
Ergonomics Society Anniversary Conference
Friday, April 24th, 2009The highlight of this week has to be the Ergonomics Society 60th Anniversary Conference, held Wednesday and Thursday at the Royal College of Physicians just by The Regent’s Park in London.
Actually the festivities kicked off on Tuesday evening with a VIP reception, where we were showered with wine and nibbles and treated to a couple of top drawer speeches from Dr Ian Gibson, MP for Norwich North, and Professor Pieter Rookmaaker, President of the Federation of European Ergonomics Societies (FEES). Dr Gibson’s speech was particularly encouraging, being a member of the Innovation Universities and Skills Committee and someone who’s especially sympathetic to the ergonomics cause. Prof Rookmaaker also drew our attention to the first European Ergonomics conference to be held in Bruges from 10th October 2010 – surely a must-attend event.
Wednesday and Thursday were the main session days, where there were several plenary papers given by esteemed ergonomists from around the world, plus a bunch of interesting sessions on topics from public health, through human factors integration, to accidents and human error.
I teamed up with Prof Jan Noyes from Bristol and Dr Sarah Sharples from Nottingham to give a session on automation, which proved intimidatingly popular with standing room only at the back. One of those where you deliberately avoid looking at the audience for fear you’ll get stage fright. I also chaired a session on road ergonomics with papers from Dr Alex Stedmon (also at Nottingham), Nick Gkikas from Loughborough, and Dr Sandy Robertson of UCL.
Fergus Bisset (who was Twittering away during the conference) and I had a stand promoting the Real World Design exhibition at the Design Museum (see my blogpost here for more), which attracted good attention from the delegates and gave us some more ideas for exhibits in the medical and consumer product areas.
Socially it was great as well, always a good opportunity to catch up with old networks and make new ones, with a very posh dinner on Wednesday night courtesy of our hosts at the RCP. And let’s not forget the location – a glorious part of London, so quiet and leafy that you could easily forget you’re actually in the capital. The RCP itself was an excellent venue, especially the Dorchester Library where the VIP reception was held.
Next year’s conference reverts to the more traditional format – this one was special for the anniversary – and will be at Keele University in Staffordshire. Hopefully see you there!
Twitter Updates from The Ergonomics Society Conference
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009The Real World Design team will be Twitter-ing updates from the Ergonomics Society Conference in London today and tomorrow. Please check out http://www.twitter.com/realworlddesign or the links at the bottom of the page to find out the latest topics of the conversation.
We realise we’ve been quiet for a little while – we’ve been busy working on plans for the exhibition, but we’ll be elaborating some of the discussions from the conference on the blog over the next couple of weeks. Please check back in again soon and use our new Facebook Connect feature to join in the discussion or point your friends in the direction of the site!