ABSTRACT

The informal history consists of the memories and impressions of the people participating in the events involving Human factors/ergonomics (HFE), the problems they recognized, and their opinions of various subjects. This chapter describes history reflected through a prism of attitudes developed by experience over many years. The effectiveness of the discipline often depended on the willingness of project managers to fund HFE. HFE professionals were able to evaluate design but had difficulty in transferring HFE requirements into design specifications. HFE was effective when recommendations made by the specialist were accepted by the design engineer. The effectiveness of HFE in industry depended not only on idiosyncratic factors like talent and salesmanship, but also on contextual factors—management knowledge and confidence in HFE, engineering knowledge of HFE, biases, and turf wars, funding nonavailability and governmental supervision and support. Engineering is the context in which HFE practitioners perform, and engineers are the people with whom they have to work.