Posts Tagged ‘industrial’
Hello Word (edited)
Posted on: February 2, 2011
Dear readers, I’ve been writing unpublished articles and book reviews extensively for many years. This blog that I started on September 15, 2008 will hopefully share my writings with a wider online audience and social platforms. I have selected 35 categories to choose from. So far, I published 1, 970 posts and received 53,000 hits. Sometimes I will also incude a few articles about my personal memoirs. I would love to receive your comments and feedback. If anyone sends me “one typical day of his diary” I will send him mine (falling on the same day as yours). I am interested in re-structuring my blog to accommodate the most convenient way to navigate my blog; please share your technique. Regards, Dr. Adonis Bouhatab PhD Industrial/Human Factors/Experimental Design Engineering.
Introspection: What Design? (#55)
Posted on: March 1, 2009
Designing what? The Human Factors Concept
The bottom line in industrial engineering is to design a system that would optimize production, inventory, distribution, material handling by maximizing profit or minimizing cost or finding a trade-off that would satisfy the marketing department, the shareholders, the after sale, the union, the consumer product, and the health and safety agencies and so forth.
Now we can recognize that optimizing a system involves inter-relationship among various interested groups of people. The inter-relationship with consumers, operators, employees, workers, management, and shareholders requires a good understanding of the research done in psychology, sociology, marketing, econometrics and other social studies. This fact is anathema to mathematical solutions that do not consider constraints on human needs, demands, safety and health regulations and specifications, and variability in capabilities and limitations and ethnic idiosyncrasies.
Can industrial engineering discipline be of any aid to small and family based businesses and industries with limited financial resources and marketing scope? It should be of aid if the boss is an industrial engineer but my opinion is that this discipline is geared toward large industrial complex that hires many employees and workers even if many sections are automated. Designing an optimum system of production without serious awareness of the research done in the consequences of shift work, pay rate, sleep deprivation, and the political infighting among departments, management, syndicates and employees is tantamount to failure. We can understand that there are many strong and interesting interactions among industrial, social, psychological and business administration fields.
Whether we like it or not human factors engineering that studies the capabilities and variability of the human element, his health and safety and risk taking tendencies or avoidance should be an intrinsic part of designing work production. The reality is that companies are wary of hiring generalists such as industrial or human factors engineers for the benefit of specific specialties that are much more in demand because they are better known, even if a global view and comprehension of a system can, in the medium and long terms, deliver much better performance in production, minimizing lost work days, turnover, human aches and pains, emotionally and physically.
Private companies conjecture that they cannot afford human factors engineers whose jobs are designing interfaces for end users to interact efficiently with complex systems; this is partly true because experimenting with human subjects is time consuming and very costly when dealing with the innumerable variables involved in studying the behavior of workers, employees, engineers and consumers.
I like the current tendency to label industrial engineering as engineering management because the scope matches the management requirement and responsibilities and avoid the connotation with mechanical design and fabrication.
“Human Factors engineering versus Industrial, Computer, and traditional engineering fields”
Posted on: October 17, 2008
Article #46, (April 30, 2006)
“Human Factors engineering versus Industrial, Computer, and traditional engineering fields”
The term “engineering” is becoming pervasive and a misnomer in the public language; a janitor calls himself a cleaning engineer since he was trained to polish hardwood floors and he might be using machines and has to maintain them by cleaning and oiling the parts; a garbage collector is a sanitary engineer though on which ground he earned that prestigious degree is flimsy; any technician is an engineer since he can read drawings and execute the plan. Mainly, the new public relation trend in the competitive job market encourage affixing “engineer” to our skills because it sound better in society’s circles and on our resume since, logically, part of an engineer’s job description is to repair or maintain the proper functioning of machines, equipment, and systems.
Maybe the title is deceiving and might leave the impression that I am attempting to compare the technical differences among traditionally well established engineering disciplines such as electrical, mechanical, civil, and aeronautic engineering, and the relatively new engineering disciplines such as computer, telecommunication, industrial, and human factors engineering. This article is actually a reminder of the purpose of an engineer, what designing should mean, and for whom products/systems are designed for.
Frankly, how superior is a freshly graduating engineer compared to a trained technician in the corresponding field? How qualified is an engineer who spent two years doing cost estimation compared to a trained technician who is still better at reading drawings, estimating the cost of his job, knowing the competing products, their specifications, and can put them together for a functioning system? If companies perceive the competence of a graduate engineer as incomplete or unsatisfactory for the market demands and that the best position for him in the first three years on the job is to cost estimate the material expenses for bids, then why the university does not train the engineer to cost estimate real life projects during his four year stint within its compound?
How long a qualified engineer should be working for a company in order for management to evaluate him as eligible to be assigned a design job which should be the purpose of his university curriculum? I know graphic designers taking on design jobs right after graduation; so what’s the problem with the engineering curriculums? My contention is that engineers are not being properly trained to be designers, or the students are not getting that impression from the messages of their instructors, or the structure of the courses are not effective in conveying a behavior’s change in the engineer’s mind..
Traditional engineering disciplines have a solid, well established knowledge base through centuries of experiments, trial and error, design guidelines, and practice. My impression is that the fact of an existing and complete knowledge base has diverted the needs of forming scientific and experimental minds and has reduced the students to kind of learning robots of primarily rule based knowledge and equations of inanimate phenomena.
The computer and telecommunication engineering disciplines are still young and offer more job opportunities with training oriented to creative designs towards end users. Moreover, the competition in advanced technology for products in the latter fields encourages the designers to build up on the “common sense” acquired from experiments and prior designs in the behavior of end users. Although the knowledge base of human capabilities/limitations, physically and cognitively, is not an intrinsic part of the curriculum, it seems that most of the current researches in psychology, marketing and human factors/ergonomics are oriented toward providing design guidelines for the computer and telecommunication engineering disciplines.
It appears that supplementing design guidelines from non engineering disciplines is giving a false sense of confidence in the computer’s engineering designs and thus, failing to impact with scientific and experimental minds in the complexity of human behavior for the graduate computer related engineers
Industrial engineering should be geared toward engineering management of industries and systems. However, the curriculums emphasize on the material and inanimate phenomena in the optimization of the processes. Learning about inventory, layout of manufacturing facilities, material handling, production processes, and optimization models for increasing performance and minimizing costs or unwarranted parameters is fine and necessary. If we recognize that managing the human element of workers, operators, secretaries, and managers is the main problem in running any system, then why not face this problem upfront? Squeezing single lame courses in human factors and, from time to a time a course in organization or management, will not cut it and will not lead to a behavioral change in designing for people or managing workers’ problems in industries. Does a graduating Industrial engineer have to rely on the archaic method of trial an error for many years of training on the job before he begins to appreciate the human factors essentials?
Is it not within the industrial engineering job description to be familiar with the difficulties facing the workers in matters like shift work, inspection, training, overtime, and turnover, or the capabilities and limitations of the workers in physical and mental abilities according to age and gender, or the safety regulations and health regulations in the workplace, or the current legal doctrine in consumer product liabilities? Claiming that many of these problems are the realm of other social disciplines will not prepare an industrial engineer to his job or achieve the purported goal of graduating capable engineers.
Human Factors/Ergonomic discipline realized that every artificial system or human made system that governs and organizes our modern life is fraught with errors and potential health and safety accidents that diminish the efficiency, validity, and reliability of these systems if a sound comprehension of the capabilities and limitations of the designers, operators, workers, and end users are not accounted for in the implementation of a system or a machine. The proclaimed purpose of Human Factors engineering is to designing interfaces among the various sections of a complete system so that the targeted user may perform efficiently his task without the need to comprehend the inner technical functioning of the system.
However, the scope of designing interfaces is vast, all encompassing, and cannot rely on general design guidelines: every system has its peculiarity, its target users, and its knowledge base. Interfaces are varied from all kinds of displays, controls, instructions manuals, training programs, and performance aids. Even designing formats for screens are not the same for computers, televisions, or specialized audio-visual complexes because each task or industry is different and the outcomes are changing as requirements change.
It appears that Human Factors discipline extended its reach and scope in every form of modern technological breakthroughs that it failed to catch up or specialize in well defined systems. Many disciplines are off shout of the Human Factors trends; for examples, biomechanical theories generated many branches in the bio technology fields and drivers simulation design modeling; display, illustration, formatting, warnings, and facilitators design guidelines generated the graphic design discipline without any theoretical foundations in perception or controlled experimentation training in its curriculum; concerns for the safety and health in the workplace generated safety engineering and industrial inspectors; human-computer interface and interactions guidelines generated computer friendly software programmers.
The fundamental concerns of Human Factors is the people within a system have generated disciplines that are focusing more on the well being of the target users without these discipline taking the pain of offering the requisite courses intended to familiarize and initiate the graduates to the complexity and scope of understanding the end users.
Adonis Diaries 