Posts Tagged ‘error taxonomies’
Multidisciplinary view of design
Posted on: October 26, 2008
Article “31 (December 18, 2005)
“A seminar on a multidisciplinary view of design”
The term “designing” is so commonly used that its all encompassing scope has lamentably shrunken in the mind of graduating engineers. This talk attempts to restore the true meaning of design as a multidisciplinary concept that draw its value from the cooperation and inputs of many practitioners in a team.
This is a scenario of a seminar targeting freshmen engineers, who will ultimately be involved in submitting design projects, is meant to orient engineers for a procedure that might provide their design projects the necessary substance for becoming marketable and effective in reducing the pitfalls in having to redesign. The ultimate purpose is to providing the correct designing behavior from the first year.
Answering the following questions might be the basis of acquiring a proper behavior in design projects, which should be carried over in their engineering careers. Many of these questions are never formally asked in the engineering curriculum.
Q1. What is the primary job of an engineer? What does design means? How do you perceive designing to look like?
A1. The discussion should be reopened after setting the tone for the talk and warming up the audience to alternative requirements of good design.
Q2. To whom are you designing? What category of people? Who are your target users? Engineer, consumers, support personnel, operators?
A2. Generate from audience potential design projects as explicit examples to develop on that idea.
Q3. What are your primary criteria in designing? Error free application product? Who commit errors? Can a machine do errors?
A3. Need to explicitly emphasize that error in the design and its usage is the primary criterion and which encompass the other more familiar engineering and business criteria
Q4. How can we categorize errors? Had you any exposure to error taxonomy? Who is at fault when an error is committed or an accident occurs?
A4. Provide a short summary of different error taxonomies; the whole administrative and managerial procedures and hierarchy of the enterprise need also to be investigated.
Q5. Can you foresee errors, near accidents, accidents in your design?
A5. Take a range oven for example, expose the foreseeable errors and accidents in the design, babies misuse and the display and control idiosyncrasy.
Q6. Can we practically account for errors without specific task taxonomy?
A6. Generate a discussion on tasks and be specific on a selected job.
Q7. Do you view yourself as responsible for designing interfaces to your design projects depending on the target users? Would you relinquish your responsibilities for being in the team assigned to designing an interface for your design project? What kinds of interfaces are needed for your design to be used efficiently?
A7. Discuss the various interfaces attached to any design and as prolongement to marketable designs.
Q8. How engineers solve problems? Searching for the applicable formulas? Can you figure out the magnitude of the answer? Have you memorized the allowable range for your answers from the given data and restriction imposed in the problem after solving so many exercises? Have you memorize the dimensions of your design problem?
A8. Figure out the magnitude and the range of the answers before attempting to solve a question; solve algebraically your equations before inputting data; have a good grasp of all the relevant independent variables.
Q9. What are the factors or independent variables that may affect your design project? How can we account for the interactions among the factors?
A9. Offer an exposition to design of experiments
Q10. Have you been exposed to reading research papers? Can you understand, analyze and interpret the research paper data? Can you have an opinion as to the validity of an experiment? Would you accept the results of any peer reviewed article as facts that may be readily applied to your design projects?
A10. Explain the need to be familiar with the procedures and ways of understanding research articles as a continuing education requirement.
Q11. Do you expect to be in charged of designing any new product or program or procedures in your career? Do you view most of your job career as a series of supporting responsibilities; like just applying already designed programs and procedures?
Q12. Are you ready to take elective courses in psychology, sociology, marketing, business targeted to learning how to design experiments and know more about the capabilities, limitations and behavioral trends of target users? Are you planning to go for graduate studies and do you know what elective courses might suit you better in your career?
A12. Taking multidisciplinary courses enhances communication among design team members and more importantly encourages reading research papers in other disciplines related to improving a design project. Designing is a vast and complex concept that requires years of practice and patience to encompass several social science disciplines.
Q13. Can you guess what should have been my profession?
A13. My discipline is Industrial engineering with a major in Human Factors oriented toward designing interfaces for products and systems. Consequently, my major required taking multidisciplinary courses in marketing, psychology and econometrics and mostly targeting various methodologies for designing experiments, collecting data and statistically analyzing gathered data in order to predict system’s behavior.
What’s that concept of Human factors in Design? (Started these articles in 2003
What is this Human Factors profession?
Article number
1. “What is your job?”
2. “Sorry, you said Human Factors in Engineering?”
3. “So, you want systems to fit people?”
4. “The rights of the beast of burden; like a donkey?”
5. “Who could afford to hire Human Factors engineers?”
6. “In peace time, why and how often are Human Factors hired?
7. “What message should the Human Factors profession transmit?”
8. “What do you design again?”
9. “Besides displays and controls, what other interfaces do you design?”
10. “How Human Factors gets involved in the Safety and Health of end users?”
11. “What kind of methods will I have to manipulate and start worrying about?”
12. “What are the error taxonomies in Human Factors?”
13. “What are the task taxonomies and how basic are they in HF?”
14. “How useful are taxonomies of methods?”
15. “Are occupational safety and health standards and regulations of any concern for the HF professionals?”
16. “Are there any major cross over between HF and safety engineering?”
17. “Tell us about a few of your teaching methods and anecdotes”
18. “What this general course in Human Factors covers?”
19. “Could one general course in Human Factors make a dent in a career behavior?”
20. “How would you like to fit Human Factors in the engineering curriculum?”
21. “How to restructure engineering curriculum to respond to end users demands?”
22. “How can a class assimilate a course material of 1000 pages?”
23. “What undergraduate students care about university courses?”
24. “Students’ feedback on my teaching method”
25. “My pet project for undergraduate engineering curriculum”
26. “Guess what my job is”
27. “Do you know what your folk’s jobs are?”
28. “How do you perceive the inspection job to mean?”
29. “How objective and scientific is a research?”
30. “How objective and scientific are experiments?”
31. “A seminar on a multidisciplinary view of design”
32. “Consumer Product Liability Engineering”
33. “How could you tell long and good stories from HF graphs?”
34. “What message has the Human Factors profession been sending?”
35. “Who should be in charge of workspace design?”
36. “Efficiency of the human body structure and mind”
37. “Psycho-physical method”
38. “Human factors performance criteria”
39. “Fundamentals of controlled experimentation methods”
40. “Experimentation: natural sciences versus people’s behavior sciences”
41. “What do Human Factors measure?”
42. “New semester, new approach to teaching the course”
43. “Controlled experimentation versus Evaluation and Testing methods”
44. “Phases in the process of system/mission analyses”
45. “Main errors and mistakes in controlled experimentations”
46. “Human Factors versus Industrial, Computer, and traditional engineering”
47. “How Human Factors are considered at the NASA jet propulsion laboratory”
48. “Efficiency of the human cognitive power or mind”
49. “Human Factors versus Artificial Intelligence”
50. Computational Rationality in Artificial Intelligence
51. “Basic Engineering and Physics Problems Transformed Mathematically”
52. Mathematics: a unifying abstraction for Engineering and Physics
53. How to optimize human potentials in businesses for profit
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