|
Marvin Dainoff is one of three nominees for president
of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. The following are his
proposed goals and directions for the society.
Goals/directions
I believe passionately in the current and potential
importance and effectiveness of the discipline of Human Factors/Ergonomics.
I believe it is impossible to overestimate the importance of what we
can contribute to society as "advocates for the user" in an
increasingly technological age. A
strong, vibrant HFES is an essential element of ensuring that our potential
as a discipline can be realized. The
following are the challenges I see facing us:
Perhaps the biggest source of concern about HFES is,
paradoxically, the source of our strength.
It is the challenge of simultaneously serving as a scientific society
and as a practice-oriented professional organization. As a consequence, there is an inherent tension between
researchers and practitioners which plays itself out in day-to-day
negotiations over details such as standards for review of journal articles
and conference presentations, allocation of resources during the national
meetings, etc. I think that we,
as a society, should embrace this tension and build on it. It makes us
stronger, bringing the critical analysis of the scientist and the practical
constraint-oriented judgement and experience of the practitioner into a
mutually beneficial relationship.
In my own experience over the last thirty years,
laboratory research and the communication skills developed in teaching a
range of students (first year undergraduates through doctoral candidates)
have made me a better consultant, while the real world experiences from the
consulting world enhanced my teaching and focussed my research.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the work of
HFES’s technical standards committees.
Academics, practitioners, and representatives of user organizations
bring various perspectives to long and often frustrating discussions, but at
the end of the day, a line must drawn in the sand and the results of the
discussion must be reduced to a set of useful principles.
In the process, inadequacies in the research base are revealed,
providing direction for new investigations.
As President, I would work toward expanding this kind of activity,
perhaps going beyond the formal standards context towards the development of
consensus working groups over a wider variety of topics.
Medical ergonomics, ecological interface design, effective virtual
environments, and design for people with disabilities are just a few of the
many possibilities.
Establishing and enhancing the relationships between
researchers and practitioners, while serving their individual needs, is not
easy. Nor is the parallel task of enhancing the transitions from basic
research to applied research to product/system development. However, solving these problems should be at the heart of
what HFES is all about.
These are internal challenges. We also have the serious external challenges of communicating
our expertise to our potential users/clients in the both public and private
sectors. Major steps have been
taken in this direction through the HFES strategic plan and the HFES
Institute and the work done since their inception.
I would build on this important foundation developed by my
predecessors so that HFES can serve as a focal point for realizing the
potential contributions of human factors/ergonomics to health, satisfaction
and productivity.
|