ABSTRACT

Many of the early leaders in E/HF saw it clearly as a systems discipline (e.g. Singleton, 1974, Sheridan and Ferrell, 1981, Rouse, 2007 and Rasmussen, 1997). Interest by the control systems community, especially focused on nuclear power, in human capability and fallibility, made clear that apparently advanced process control systems would fail if these induced errors in operators and managers (and actually needed human expertise to work properly), and this spawned a movement in cognitive systems engineering and subsequently joint cognitive systems. The systems design orientation of these and many others in E/HF was based on them dealing with large and complex systems, with many interacting components, and where the cognitive interactions are intimately related to the physical ones through positioning and layout of information displays for instance and the social (communications, co-ordination and collaboration with others). Even within the classical ergonomics applied to industrial workplaces, physical work, and manual handling, and to devices and equipment used within them, leading ergonomists worldwide have clearly seen that we can only usefully address the relevant human factors concerns at a systems level, whether we call it systems ergonomics, participatory ergonomics/design or macroergonomics.