Our Definitions, and comments

The International Ergonomics Association (IEA) council adopted, August 2000, an official definition of ergonomics: “Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.” This is a wide reaching definition.

Ergonomics and its related area of Usability plays a vital role in design of Control Room/Centre (CCR, CCC), Command Control Room (CCR), Data warehousing, cockpit control.

Design and work in all these areas covers a large number of applications, e.g. industrial processes; automatic storage; traffic control: air, sea, road, rail; security; safety, alarm, emergency; business and trading, e.g. CO2; Environmental control; Management and Leadership of e.g. MNCs, International organisations, Governments; Medical and Health surveillance; Etc.

In all these areas of applications the performance of People is dependent upon the design of displays, controls, environments, furniture, buildings, IT systems, technology in general. Humans are superior to technology in flexibility and ability to improvise. However to optimize People-Technology system performance technology must be adapted to humans’ prerequisites – social, psychological, physiological and anatomical. Only then, we can expect the people-technology system to provide reliability, safety and security and the expected economic and human good. Over and above we will in addition create good working conditions for the related personnel which in turn will improve motivation and quality of working life. Design of Control Rooms/Centres are extremely demanding and requires a holistic understanding not only of all the relevant technologies but also of people!

Extensive research over more than thirty years has provided a large insight and knowledge about the interaction of people-technology systems in control rooms/centres. However, the practices of using this knowledge is still lacking behind. Apparently there is a need for a much closer cooperation between the practitioners and researchers in this area.