ABSTRACT
Ergonomics, now more commonly known as Human Factors (HF) is a relatively new discipline that started to be considered in the defence industry around World War II by people such as Hywel Murrel, through the Naval Motion Study Unit (NMSU) in 1947. Murrel emphasised the scientific basis of ergonomics and helped establish its use in system design and development (Stammers, 2007). More recently, in an article in the UK MoD Defence Equipment and Support journal, ‘Desider’, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, Chief of the Defence Staff, stated that “Evidence shows that more than half our accidents and incidents are down to human factors; in other words it is our people who are causing most damage to our fighting capability. We must do something to understand these factors and drive down the number of accidents and incidents.” (Stirrup, 2009). Despite this top level acknowledgement of the growing importance of HF, historically, within the UK defence sector, the integration of HF into design has been poor. When HF is taken up correctly it has
a significant impact on system design, as Stone (2009) demonstrated it improved the level of fidelity for an IED search and disposal simulator.
