ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses practice and aims to apply a dose of reality to the ordinarily somewhat artificial description of Human factors/ergonomics (HFE). It describes the demography of the specialist: his or her activities in system development, work in the government laboratory, and HFE in contract research. The HFE specialist in system development is ordinarily thought of not as a researcher, but as one who works in engineering development. The computer interface involves the physical terminal as well as a behavioral interface, which includes what and how stimuli are presented by the software to the user. A contractor organization makes its living primarily by performing research under contract to a governmental or civilian agency or company and by occasionally supplying professionals to work on a temporary basis in an engineering facility to support a specific system development. The contractor works in tandem with a contract monitor assigned from the funding agency.
