Principles of procedural support in man-machine systems

Two alternative ways of embedding human performance models into man-machine systems exist, namely embedding them directly into the man-machine interface or into the technical system proper as a decision support. The boundary between these two solutions is rather fuzzy and their simultaneous application could also be reasonable and effective

The third age of human factors: From independence to interdependence

International audienceSince its beginning in the mid 1940s, human factors has tried to keep up with the ever increasing demands from technological and societal developments. Looking back, the development of human factors can be described as corresponding to three ages. In the first age, humans were seen as too too imprecise, variable, and slow to allow the full use of the technological potential. In the second age, humans were seen as failure prone and unreliable, hence a challenge to system safety. In both ages, the human was treated as an entity, as a part that could be described independently of the whole. In the third age, humans are recognised as being necessary if work systems are to be safe and productive. Human performance variability is accepted as the necessary basis for effectively coping with the complexity of the work situations and system performance is understood as the non-trivial result of interdependent parts

"Safe in an unsafe world: Bringing Safety-II into practice"

The sustained existence of modern societies depends on the safe and efficient functioning of multiple systems, functions, and specialised services. Because these often are tightly coupled, safety cannot be managed simply by responding whenever something goes wrong. Both theory and practice make clear that safety management that follows developments rather than leads them runs a significant risk of lagging behind and of becoming reduced to uncoordinated and fragmentary fire-fighting. (The same, of course, goes for the management of quality and productivity.) In order to prevent this from happening, safety management must look ahead, not only to avoid that things go wrong but also – and more importantly – to ensure that they go right.1 Proactive safety management must focus on how everyday performance usually goes well rather than on why it occasionally fails, and must actively try to improve the former rather than simply prevent the latter.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The changing nature of risk

http://www.ergonomics.org.au/downloads/EA_Journals/EA_March_June_08.pdfInternational audienceThe crucial change that took place in the 19th century was that accidents became associated with the technological systems that people designed, built, and used as part of work, in the name of progress and civilisation. Suddenly, accidents happened not only because the people involved, today referred to as people at the sharp end, did something wrong or because of an act of nature, but also because a human-made system failed. Furthermore, the failures were no longer simple, such as a scaffolding falling down or a wheel axle breaking. The failures were complex, in the sense that they usually defied the immediate understanding of the people at the sharp end. In short, their knowledge and competence was about how to do their work, and not about how the technology worked or functioned. Before this change happened, people could take reasonable precautions against accidents at work because they understood the tools and artefacts they used sufficiently well. After this change had happened, that was no longer the case

From protection to resilience: Changing views on how to achieve safety

International audienceEffective safety management requires the ability to learn from the past and to anticipate the future. Yet what we can learn from the past (i.e., accident investigation) and what we can imagine for the future (i.e., risk assessment) depends critically on how we think about it, i.e., the models and methods we have at our disposal. Accident investigations have long been dominated by a search for causes, either as root causes or human errors. Risk assessment has similarly been dominated by static representations such as event and fault trees. In both cases the commonly used models and methods have reached their limits because the reality of our self-created socio-technical environments has become too complex. The alternative is to understand how the variability of human actions is a resource rather than a threat and to define safety as a system's resilience, its ability to adapt and adjust, rather than as the absence of adverse outcomes

Some myths about industrial safety

MINES ParisTech - CRC Technical Report.There are many definitions of safety, but most of them are variations on the theme that safety can be measured by the number of adverse outcomes. This vision has consequences for how industry thinks safety can be achieved. This paper looks at six safety-related assumptions, or safety myths, which impact industry practices. We argue that these practices are littered with fragile beliefs, which in many cases make the safety management flawed and ineffectual. The open acknowledgement of these myths is a necessary first step to genuinely improve industrial safety

Study on Developments in Accident Investigation Methods: A Survey of the "State-of-the-Art

Available on: http://www.stralsakerhetsmyndigheten.se/Global/Publikationer/Rapport/Sakerhet-vid-karnkraftverken/2008/SKI-Rapport-2008-50.pdfSKI Report 2008:50 (Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate) - ISSN 1104-1374The objective of this project was to survey the main accident investigation methods that have been developed since the early or mid-1990s. The motivation was the increasing frequency of accidents that defy explanations in simple terms, for instance cause-effect chains or “human error”. Whereas the complexity of socio-technical systems is steadily growing across all industrial domains, including nuclear power production, accident investigation methods are only updated when their inability to account for novel types of accidents and incidents becomes inescapable. Accident investigation methods therefore typically lag behind the socio-technological developments by 20 years or more

Reclaiming human machine nature

Extending and modifying his domain of life by artifact production is one of the main characteristics of humankind. From the first hominid, who used a wood stick or a stone for extending his upper limbs and augmenting his gesture strength, to current systems engineers who used technologies for augmenting human cognition, perception and action, extending human body capabilities remains a big issue. From more than fifty years cybernetics, computer and cognitive sciences have imposed only one reductionist model of human machine systems: cognitive systems. Inspired by philosophy, behaviorist psychology and the information treatment metaphor, the cognitive system paradigm requires a function view and a functional analysis in human systems design process. According that design approach, human have been reduced to his metaphysical and functional properties in a new dualism. Human body requirements have been left to physical ergonomics or "physiology". With multidisciplinary convergence, the issues of "human-machine" systems and "human artifacts" evolve. The loss of biological and social boundaries between human organisms and interactive and informational physical artifact questions the current engineering methods and ergonomic design of cognitive systems. New developpment of human machine systems for intensive care, human space activities or bio-engineering sytems requires grounding human systems design on a renewed epistemological framework for future human systems model and evidence based "bio-engineering". In that context, reclaiming human factors, augmented human and human machine nature is a necessityComment: Published in HCI International 2014, Heraklion : Greece (2014