Human Factors in Design? All Fields claiming to be designers first…
Posted on: December 22, 2012
Human Factors in Design
The term Design is all the rage.
Any professional in any field feels it imperative to add Design in the title.
Engineers, graphic professionals, photographers, dancers, environmentalists, climatologists, scientists… they all claim to be designers first.
And this is very refreshing.
Have you heard of this new field of Design Anthropology? https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/design-anthropology-why-are-there-designs-not-meant-for-human/
Dori Tunstall said in an interview with Debbie Millman:
“Design translate values into tangible experiences…Design can help make values such as equality, democracy, fairness, integration, connection…(values that we have lost to some extent), more tangible and express how we can use them to make the world a better place…”
Looks like Tunstall expanded the term design to overlap with the political realm of Congress jobs, law makers, political parties, election laws…
It is about time that everyone “think design” when undertaking any project or program
Anything we do is basically designed, explicitly or implicitly: Either we are generating products and programs for mankind, or it is mankind who is in charge of executing, controlling and managing what has been conceived.
So long as human are directly involved in using a product or a program, any design must explicitly study and research the safety, health, and mistakes that the operators and users will encounter.
Must as well that the design be as explicit in the attributes of health, safe usage, errors that might generate serious consequences, materially, mentally or physically.
Four decade ago, there was a field of study called Human Factors.
The term Human Factors was considered too general to be taken seriously in Engineering.
The implicit understanding was that “Of course, when an engineer designs anything, it is the human who is targeted….”
However, besides applying standards and mathematical formulas, engineers are the least concerned directly with the safety, health of users: The standards are supposed to take care of these superfluous attributes…
And who are the people concerned in setting standards?
Standards are arrived at in a consensus process between the politicians and the business people, and rarely the concerned users and consumers are invited to participate in the debate, except in later sessions when standards are already drafted…
And how explicitly experiments were designed to allow users to test, and give feedback to any kinds of standards, handed down from successive standard sets…?
Countless engineers and scientists are directly engaged in putting rovers on Mars and launching shuttles and… and the human in the project is taken for granted…
If you ask them whether they have human factors engineers in their teams, they don’t understand what you mean.
The project is supposed to be an engineering project, and “where the hell did you bring this human thing in the picture?”
Anything that is designed must consider the health, safety, and how a person from various ages, genders, and ethnic idiosyncracies might use the product or the program…
Take all the time in design process. People are not supposed to be used as ginea pigs for any redesigned process… after countless lawsuits, pains, suffering…
This is a preliminary draft. Any input and replies?
Note: https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/whats-that-concept-of-human-factors-in-design/
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