ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a descriptive theoretical structure for human factors. The structure is based on a view of technology as the principal method through which humans expand their bounds of perception and action but also as the medium through which control is arbitrated in systems of increasing complexity and abstraction which explore the new ‘territory’ revealed. The theory presents a broad rationale for the contemporary impetus in human factors and historical motivations for its growth. It is suggested that human factors is unlike other traditional divisions of knowledge and is more than the mere haphazard 15interdisciplinary collaboration between the engineering and the behavioral sciences. In identifying the opportunities and constraints intrinsic to emergent dynamic operational spaces derived from the interplay of human, machine, task, and environment, we point to a future for human factors as the essential link in the co-evolutionary development of biological and nonbiological forms of intelligence, the failure of which will see the certain demise of one and the fundamental impoverishment of the other.
‘Science above all things is for the uses of life.’
