Work with Technology

Working with technology is tantamount to working in a joint system where in every situation the most important thing is to understand what one is supposed to do. The joint system is the unique combination of people and machines that is needed to carry out a given task or to provide a specific function. In this book the focus is on a particular group of people that are called operators. An operator is the person who is in charge of controlling the system and who also has the responsibility for the system’s performance. In the joint system, both operators and machines are necessary for function; it follows that operators need and depend on machines and that machines need and depend on their operators. The decision of how far to extend the notion of people and machines, that is, how much to include in the description of the system, is entirely pragmatic and should not worry us in this context. The important thing is to recognize that the joint system exists in an organizational and social context, and that it therefore should be studied in vivo and not in vitro. A particular consequence of this is that expertise should not be seen as the individual mastery of discrete tasks, but as a quality that exists in the social context of praxis (cf. Norros, chapter 9, this volume). Where the boundaries of the joint system are set may, for all practical purposes, be determined by the nature of the investigation and the level of the analysis. In some cases, the boundaries of the joint system coincide with the physical space of the control room. But it is frequently necessary to include elements that are distributed in space and time, such as management, training, safety policies, software design, and so forth. It is quite common to refer simply to a man-machine system (MMS) ¹ , hence a joint system as the combination of a human and a machine needed to provide a specific function. The reason for using the singular “man and machine” rather than “people and machines” is partly tradition and partly the fact that we are very often considering the situation of the individual operator (although not necessarily an operator who is single or isolated). The term machine should not be understood as a single physical machine, for example, a lathe, a pump, or a bus, but rather as the technological part of the system, possibly including a large number of components, machines, computers, controlling devices, and so forth. An example is an airplane, a distillation column, a train, or even a computer network. Similarly, the term man should not be understood as a single person (and definitely not as a male person) but rather as the team of people necessary for the joint system to function. An example is the team of controllers in air traffic control.