Book Description

Within recent years we have come to hear a great deal about systems; business systems, weapon systems, data-processing systems, manufacturing systems, transportation systems, and communication systems are but a few. Each involves the control, handling, processing, or sensing of materials or information and each involves somewhere in the system a user, an operator, or a maintenance technician. The primary goal of human factors engineering is to help design and develop optimal systems. A human factors program in system design consists of planned activities in three major areas: identification and analysis of human performance requirements, design of equipment and job aids, and development of the personnel subsystem. The human factors program is coordinated with and interacts with development of a system, from preliminary design through the end of the development cycle. Human factors specialists are required to determine the role man should play in the system, help design the equipment he will work with, establish the tasks he will perform, and improve the environment in which he will live while a part of the system. Personnel requirements must be determined, selection tests devised and validated, personnel trained, and their proficiency evaluated. To accomplish this requires a broad interdisciplinary fraternity of specialists all concerned in one way or another with man: anthropologists, psychologists, physiologists, equipment designers, educators, and even administrators. Each contributes scientific knowledge of human behavior and his own methods of approaching and researching problems. This symposium will concern itself with the contributions made by industry, education, research, and the military to this broad field of human factors in system development, as suggested above. "Contributions" can be construed as meaning those efforts, past, present, or anticipated, carried on by the respective agency (industrial, educational, research, military) which develop and/or advance the science and art of human factors as applied to system development. The objective of the symposium is an attempt at fulfillment of the purpose of the Human Factors Society: "Providing for professional and personal interchange of ideas among workers concerned with human factors, and to promote understanding of the human factors involved in the development and use of systems and devices of all kinds.”