Driver distractons - the next generation

Hot on the heels (well, at least warm on the heels) of my last post about texting and driving, news from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas is that Ford is blazing a trail with a whole new raft of potentially distracting technologies.  "MyFord" essentially offers mobile phone apps through the car using wifi or 3G technology.

I don't need to go into detail about why this might be bad - partly because I don't want to invite trouble (at least until we get the libel reform through), but mainly because the points have been well made elsewhere.  In this article, parallels are drawn with the mobile phone problem, which we already know so much about.  Meanwhile, the Consumer Reports Blog makes some excellent points about how MyFord has been designed according to principles learned from household and consumer products.  But, and I'll quote, "should portable electronics and home appliances really be the benchmark for automotive interface design?"

In all fairness, I haven't even seen the interface myself, so I'm just speculating, and I could therefore add a little balance to the argument.  Perhaps, if the interface is well designed, it might reduce distraction by bringing all the drivers' in-car infotainment interactions in one place.  The ergonomic view argues that an integrated interface is better than lots of disparate systems dotted all over the car, vying for attention with their bells and whistles.  And if, as we might as well accept, drivers aren't going to stop using their phones and will invariably bring other nomadic devices into the car, maybe it's better that we have a bit of control over that and design it into the car?

Probably this is clutching at straws.  But who am I to say - we should let the research sort it out.  And for that, maybe we should thank Ford for putting more research opportunities out there...

Texting while driving

Okay, so I'm catching up on stuff after the Christmas break, but this is one paper that's made quite a splash - I'm certainly not the first to be blogging about it.  The latest issue of the journal Human Factors features a paper by Frank Drews and colleagues which, I gather, is the first peer-reviewed study on the effects of texting on driver performance.

As you might expect, texting and driving is bad.  Worse, in fact, than talking on the phone - and we already know that's bad enough, having been equated to serious drink-driving.  Texting slows brake reactions, impairs longitudinal and lateral control, and increases crash risk.

The study has already attracted some critcism for only involving young drivers - but I'd say that if young people can't text and drive, then the effects would be worse for older drivers.  The research will, I'm sure, be done in time, and this paper will no doubt become very heavily cited.

One other implication in the media coverage which concerns me is the potential for this to drown the effects of talking on the phone while driving - some of the articles I've seen are spun to suggest that because texting is so bad, phoning isn't so bad after all.  We (as a community) need to make sure that we don't forget how bad phoning and driving is - whether handheld or hands-free.

Surprisingly, you can download this paper for free here - though how long this will be available I don't know.

Review of the decade

At the end of every year, there always seems to be a contagion of top 10 (or 100, or 1000) lists in the media reviewing the previous 12 months - usually on TV, featuring various rent-a-quote nonentities.  Naturally, at the end of 2009, there were even more of these to ensure we'd covered the last 10 years.  However, a couple of websites have caught my eye as they've been reviewing the technological progress in the 'noughties'.

I must have a short memory, as I was quite surprised to see just how many gadgets that we now take for granted are less than a decade old.  The iPod and iPhone, Freeview and flatscreen TVs, and more recently the Kindle and other e-book readers have all been born since 2000.  Perhaps with even more impact, the rise of the social web started in 2000 with the launch of Friends Reunited.

Obviously I'm interested in the human-centred design implications of such advances.  It all serves to reinforce my long-held conviction that with the world getting more technological, the implications for cognitive ergonomics are ever more significant.  I'm sure I said somewhere that the 21st century is the century of the user...

Ergonomics: Real Design

Well, it's finally arrived - all of our hard work over the last year or so has paid off, and the Ergonomics: Real Design exhibition at London's Design Museum is now open.

There was a media preview last Tuesday, which generated us some excellent coverage on the BBC and in The Independent, as well as several popular design magazines. Then it opened to the public on Wednesday, and by all accounts the feedback is good, and people are engaging with the exhibition as we hoped.

Last night was the big fanfare though - the Ergonomics Society (now officially known as the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors) held a private VIP reception for over 100 people, which - in my humble opinion - went down very well indeed. There was certainly a real buzz about the place, and for me it really brought it home that the exhibition had really happened. I think until I saw people actually going round it, it hadn't quite sunk in with me. All very exciting.

I must say thanks again to everyone who pulled together to make it happen - Fergus, Gemma, Margaret, Laura, Roger, Colin, and of course Reg, who got the ball rolling in the first place and has stuck with the project all the way through. Finally, a nod to the sponsors, the EPSRC, who are evidently quite pleased with it as it's currently featuring on the front page of their website too.

For more info, see the Design Museum's website.

New cars, new toys

I’ve been playing with new cars again today – one of the few perks of the job which crop up from time to time. I can’t give too much away as it was a closed meeting, but most of the cars and their associated technologies are already on the market so I can talk in general terms. Suffice to say I got to drive several cars much more valuable than my own (some would even pay off my mortgage…), and each jam-packed with active safety gadgets. In fact, that was one of my first observations – the sheer amount of technology and computing power now being rammed into cars, with radars, cameras and sensors literally everywhere.

Anyway, that’s not what I really wanted to talk about. I’ve aired my thoughts about vehicle automation before on this blog, so I won’t go over old ground, but there was a couple of new observations I wanted to pick up on.

One or two of the vehicle manufacturers are using speed sign recognition cameras, sometimes coupled with a GPS map database, to display current speed limit information inside the car. I can only think this is a Good Thing – I don’t have evidence, but to my mind many speeding offences aren’t for lack of restraint, rather are to do with drivers missing or forgetting the last sign they passed. Sometimes the road environment even tries to trip us up, with outdated laws preventing the use of repeater signs for 30mph limits, for instance. I for one would really like one of these cars with a speed limit aide-memoire, and would much prefer that over an ISA system which just stops me from speeding. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a speeder, it just makes me uncomfortable to take control from the driver in that way. And this is a personal and professional opinion, as I’ve written about in this paper.

Which brings me onto my next point – who’s in charge? The same paper talks about philosophies of ‘hard’ vs. ‘soft’ automation – basically regarding who has the last power of veto, the computer (hard) or the human (soft). We’ve seen aircraft manufacturers take different approaches based on these philosophies, and it’s now fascinating to see vehicle manufacturers doing the same thing. My view is the same as it’s always been – we should support drivers, not replace them. But I qualify that in the paper by talking about ‘below the line’ vehicle operations (such as ABS, ESC – and I could now include last-minute collision mitigation in that) which can be automated since they don’t consciously affect the driver’s task.

It seems that many of these technologies are going down well with the customers. My concern is whether that translates into better (safer) driving (for which we don’t have the data yet), and if there are any longer-term behavioural compensations that might cancel out any beneficial effects.

One thing I certainly didn’t expect from the day, though, was for the cars to be groping me – one of them had a seat massager (for passengers), while another had a ‘dynamic seat bolster’ to stop you sliding about in corners. Definitely a new experience for me…

Ghosts of transport yet to come

I had the privilege this week of presenting at the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety's (PACTS) conference on 'Beyond 2010: the challenges ahead'. This was largely centred around the proposed road safety strategy for the future (which I've commented on before) and had a very much 'what are we going to do about it' feel. Interestingly, the opening sessions were largely focused on the environmental aspects of driving and promotion of eco-driving, as opposed to safe driving. I found this surprising given the context, but perhaps represents a shift in emphasis for transport policy. Naturally I was banging the drum for human-centred design and how it can solve all our problems for safe and eco-driving in the future. Simple as that.

One of the most memorable presentations from the day was the last one (probably a recency effect...) from ACPO's Mick Giannasi, talking in part about Gwent Police's recent campaign on texting and driving. The 'Cow' video has made it around the world already and has had some ten million hits apparently, even though it was only supposed to be a local thing and was done on a budget of about £10k. (Excerpts are on YouTube - link above - though you have to log in as it's deemed to be graphic material.) This is just amazing impact from both road safety and public engagement perspectives. Mick also showed evidence of how it's already working locally, with its first screening at an event for young drivers in South Wales - cameras were trained on the crowd to record reactions, and interviews afterwards showed the effect it had on those present. It really is hard-hitting.

After the PACTS conference I went straight to Imperial College for the Lloyd's Register Educational Trust's Annual Lecture in Transport Risk Management. Gretchen Burrett, Director of Safety at National Air Traffic Services (NATS), talked about human factors in aviation and air traffic control. She gave a really splendid exposition of the benefits of human factors in safety-critical systems. One of the stand-out points for me was how they're actually recording positive changes in behaviour as markers of effectiveness for HF in the cost-benefit analysis - that's as opposed to just monitoring reductions in errors or accidents. I was really impressed with this approach - I've long thought that one of our biggest barriers in uptake of HF is persuading people of the benefits. Since nobody notices the absence of accidents, people like Gretchen are otherwise the unsung heroes of safety. Measuring positive changes that people will actually notice is a great way for HF to hammer home its message.

Driving Ergonomics Special Interest Group

Yesterday I went to the inaugural meeting of the Ergonomics Society’s newest Special Interest Group (SIG) – the Driving Ergonomics SIG. This was hosted at Cranfield University, though the SIG has been set up and chaired by Nick Gkikas of Loughborough University.

There’s currently some 20-odd members in the SIG, and more than half of those turned up yesterday. It’s a really good mix of academic and industrial members too, with representatives from the likes of Jaguar, Nissan, and TRL.

The meeting had a speed-dating feel to it, with rapid fire presentations from a selection of attendees – Steve Summerskill from Loughborough, Chris Day from Nissan, me, and Nick Reed from TRL – all in less than an hour! But this was quite nice to get a sampler of the backgrounds of members. And whether by accident or design, there was good balance between physical ergonomics (Steve and Chris) and the more cognitive side (Nick and me).

It already promises to be a highly active SIG, with much discussion (at the time and afterwards via the new LinkedIn group) about the objectives of the SIG and what various members want to get out of it. We’re planning to meet quarterly, and longer-term ambitions are to have some outputs – maybe a conference session, for instance. I certainly think it’s a Good Thing, and with such an enthusiastic membership it has a lot of momentum behind it.

I’m only sorry I couldn’t get to the pub for more discussion afterwards – but then I was driving home, so couldn’t have sampled the local’s finest anyway…

HCI International 2009

So this is slightly old news now, but seeing as I've finally got over the jet lag and on top of my inbox, I'm just about in a position to tell you about the Human-Computer Interaction International conference I went to last week.

HCII is a series of conferences which has assimilated nine other conference series over the years. I started going to Don Harris'

Engineering Psychology & Cognitive Ergonomics conferences from

the first one in 1996, and then at the 4th conference these came under the HCII umbrella. Interestingly, this year saw the first appearance of a conference track on human-centred design (though they insisted on using the US English spelling, with an extra 'e' in 'centered').

I was privileged to chair a session on each of the EP&CE and HCD tracks, also presenting on our Foot-LITE project in the EP&CE session. Both were interesting sessions with a varied set of topics; the EP&CE session focusing on transport automation, with examples from rail, road (two wheels and four!) and air, while the HCD session covered applications from mobile phones to web design.

The rest of the conference was packed with interesting papers and posters - indeed, the biggest problem with this series is that with

so many tracks, it's hard to decide what you want to go to (let alone keeping on top of the timetable). And it was in a great location - the Town & Country resort in San Diego. The hotel is a little removed from the downtown centre, but next door to a couple of big shopping malls - which offered good eating and drinking options. San Diego is just lovely, a perfect climate and a really good feel to the town.

Curiously, I quite often bumped into the odd superhero around the hotel. I did ponder for a while what interest the Watchmen might have in HCI, but then I realised there was also a big comic conference in town at the same time...

Ergonomics in the news

As I'm sure many others do, I subscribe to Google's news alerts looking out for media stories on ergonomics and/or human factors. When I first signed up, there wasn't a lot of activity, and the stuff they picked up on was pretty obscure. More recently, though, there's been a lot more substantial pickings coming through. Whether this is due to Google getting even better at what they do, or more ergonomics stories in the news, I don't know, but either way it's a good sign in my book.

Then the other day my good mate Steve Shorrock sets up a couple of blogs to help the cause further – Ergonomics & Human Factors in the News, and Ergonomics & Human Factors: Research into Practice. Both of these are going to be great sources of info on popular applications of ergonomics for those both in and outside the field, and I highly recommend them to you. It’s kind of half what I had in mind for this blog, actually, but Steve’s doing a far better job of it than I would, so I’ll leave that to him and focus on other things.

I can only see these kinds of developments as good news for ergonomics – getting the stories more widely distributed and making them more accessible to the people that really matter – the end users!

Armchair ergonomists

I’ve been to a couple of events this week that have inspired me to think more about how to engage a wider public with ergonomics and human-centred design issues.

The first was the British Science Association’s Science Communication Conference, an excellent event with a star-studded list of presenters, including Lord Professor Robert Winston, Professor Kathy Sykes, and Professor Jim Al-Khalili. One of the key principles of this whole area is that we (as scientists) don’t just sit in our ivory towers and assume everyone’s stupid and that we have to teach them. Science Communication is a two-way process, and actually most (non-scientist) people are starting from a baseline with a bit of knowledge about a lot of things.

This is something I think wholeheartedly applies to ergonomics. In fact, most people are amateur ergonomists – everyone knows, on some level, when they’ve used a product or system that has been well (or badly) designed. A lot of them would have a good idea of how they want it fixed, too. I mean, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? A human-centred design process starts with identifying the users’ needs, and who best to tell us about them? So the only problem, as far as I see it, is that these amateur ergonomists just don’t call it ergonomics – and consequently might not think to turn to ‘professional’ ergonomists or The Ergonomics Society.

And that brings me onto my second point – which was inspired by discussions at The Ergonomics Society’s awayday, where Council met up to discuss our vision and strategy for the future. The old ‘ergonomically designed product’ chestnut was rolled out (which I’ve blogged on before – and will come back to later), and that set my train of thought off on armchair ergonomists again. Because it’s about understanding what ergonomics is really about – so not only are people sometimes acting as ergonomists without knowing it, they’re also being sold a perception of ergonomics which is inaccurate.

There’s a great little anecdote from our experience at Cheltenham which illustrates this nicely. I got talking to a little girl and her family about our stand and what ergonomics is all about, and they told me a story about a design exercise the girl did at school recently, to design a pencil that’s easier to use for people. She explained how she made it slightly bigger so it’s easier to hold, shaped for the hand, and grip areas for the fingers. I told her she was being an ergonomist without even realising it! The best bit was that she refrained from just putting a bit of rubber on the pencil…

Distracted drivers

Something I’ve been meaning to post on since I saw it a month ago, is a story on ergoweb with a new perspective on the perennial problem of driver distractions from mobile phones. As the article comments, and as I’ve mentioned here a few times before, the fact that mobile phones are distracting is nothing new to ergonomists. But this new research from Liberty Mutual suggests that drivers aren’t aware of how much they’re being distracted.

I think this is interesting from a number of perspectives. There’s all the deep psychological stuff, such as the interaction between mental workload and situation awareness (that is, the fact that they’re loaded with a distracting task possibly affects their own self-awareness of their performance, let alone awareness of the road situation). And there’s the practical implications, like how drivers will be more willing to engage in these activities if they don’t see them as a problem – also relevant to drink, drugs, fatigue, and any number of driver impairments.

The story focuses on in-car distractions, but it’s also piqued my interest in outside distractions to – relevant to a study I conducted on roadside advertising in our driving simulator at Brunel, which has just been published in Transportation Research Part F. I was stunned by the impact this study had with people on both sides of the argument – safety campaigners and advertising professionals alike – and the preliminary report I produced has been widely circulated while the paper was in the publication process. In fact, the advertising industry commissioned an “independent” report specifically to discredit my report, which mainly criticised the study on the grounds it hadn’t been peer-reviewed (which it has now) and that it was conducted in a simulator (which I defended in the paper). I should probably be upset that they commissioned this report, but it’s actually faintly amusing that they took the study so seriously.

Anyway, I see a clear link from this to the Liberty Mutual findings about awareness of distractions. Advertising, by its nature, is designed to attract attention – almost without us knowing it, otherwise it hasn’t done its job. So it’s a double-whammy if drivers are unwillingly being distracted, and then being unaware of how that’s affected their driving. But it’s not just that – if there’s an intuitive belief that distractions such as advertising don’t seem so bad, then it means there’s an even more pressing need for hard quantitative data to close the case.

Cheltenham Festival of Science

No prizes for guessing what this post is about – last week we took a sample of the Real World Design exhibition to the Cheltenham Festival of Science as a sneak preview for them and a test run for us. Needless to say, this was a fantastic opportunity, afforded to us by some great work in the Ergonomics Society office, which we grabbed with both hands.

Cheltenham is one of the biggest science festivals in the UK, and always attracts some star names – we caught a glimpse of Robert Winston floating about; also in attendance and giving lectures were the likes of Richard Hammond, Carol Vorderman, and Alice Roberts (though I'm personally disappointed I didn't bump into her).

The preview exhibit we took was related to the ergonomics of the Sky TV remote control, which is the most advanced piece of work we currently have on the exhibition project. Fergus Bisset, the design researcher on the project, did a stellar job of putting together an innovative stand at short notice, complete with interactive elements. Fergus also carried the can for the whole duration of the festival, assisted on different days by staff and members of the Ergonomics Society, who kindly gave up their time to help out (pictured right is Dave O’Neill, Chief Executive of the Ergonomics Society). Our thanks go out to all, it was an enormous help and above and beyond the call of duty.

All in all I think we can say it was a successful week – just getting the exhibit into Cheltenham was an achievement in itself! But we also had a lot of interest from children and adults alike, helped no end by being on the EPSRC’s ‘Impact Trail’, so the children were encouraged to come and see us for an answer in their question booklet. It’s also been a learning experience in taking things forward to the big exhibition in November – which I know will come round sooner than we think.

A safer way: road safety consultation

I've been meaning to mention this in my blog for a while, but other newsworthy things have been happening to report on. Anyway, the UK's Department for Transport currently has open a consultation on road safety strategy to take us beyond 2010, when the current strategy expires.

I've been feeding in comments via a couple of avenues, which I don't need to go into too much detail about here, but on the whole I'm actually rather reassured by what I've seen. The main win, in my eyes, is the key acknowledgement of the 'systems' approach in road safety - that is, viewing the road, the vehicle, and the driver as an interactive system, where you can't just treat any one element in isolation. Indeed, this is reflective of a general move towards such thinking in road safety at the European level.

Of course, systems thinking has been an underpinning tenet of ergonomics for some 60 years now (as I found out last week), and whilst I'm not sure we can claim the credit for influencing these high-level policy-makers, it's good to see the principles being taken on board. Happy coincidence or otherwise, personally I don't care where it came from, the good news is that we're all starting to think on the same wavelength.

There are also some positive noises regarding the role of technology in road (vehicle) safety - in terms of primary safety, crash avoidance systems, where they're calling for an evidence-based approach to implementation. The gloss is taken off a little as they seem to slightly overlook the ergonomics issues; the evidence they're seeking is more in terms of technical reliability. So there is room for more critical response to the consultation, after all.

If you have a vested interest in road safety I would encourage a review of the consultation document, and if you feel so inclined to respond then there's nothing stopping you. My views are just my views, and I wouldn't presume to try and sway your opinion, but to my mind it just needs a bit more of a human-centred approach.

Ergonomics Society Annual Lecture

On Tuesday evening this week I had the pleasure of attending the Ergonomics Society Annual Lecture, given by Professor Rob Stammers of the University of Leicester, on 'Kenneth Craik: a progenitor for ergonomics'. It was at the Royal Society of Arts, just off the Strand in London - a prestigious venue with very nice hospitality beforehand!

Craik was a psychologist who did his most profound work during the Second World War, and as Rob explained, was really ahead of his time in coming up with ergonomics issues and theories that we're still working with today. And remember that this is a good 5-10 years before the formation of the Ergonomics Research Society (now The Ergonomics Society) in 1949.

There were many gems in Craik's work that stood out for me, not least of all his exposition of the systems approach as necessary to understand the interplay between human and machine. For me, as someone still (relatively!) early in his career, this was a bit of a revelation as I always thought that systems thinking was a relatively recent approach - it's certainly only just getting into the minds of road safety experts (see the Department for Transport's recent consultation - I'll come back to this another time).

The other one that really hit me was how - as Rob explained it - Craik saw ergonomics as a means of genetic modification in design evolution. In other words, we can't wait for design to evolve out the bad genes, as there's too much at stake - we have to accelerate the process. This is a lovely turnaround from what I often teach my students, in that technology and design are nowadays evolving so quickly that they're outpacing the human ability to keep up.

Museums and conferences

It’s been another busy week, with a couple of interesting days providing great opportunities to wave the flag for human-centred design and ergonomics.

On Tuesday I gave a presentation at the Design Museum to other university lecturers in design, as part of the museum’s ‘Design Factory’ student initiative. I won’t steal the museum’s thunder by saying too much about that here; it’ll appear on the museum’s website in due course. But suffice to say the museum has given us the fantastic opportunity to get involved with this initiative and linking it in with the ergonomics exhibition we’re showcasing there later in the year.

The next day I was invited to give a talk at a conference on drink and drug driving, organised by the road safety charity Brake. They’d picked up on my recent experiment on driving when hungover, which I conducted for RSA, the UK’s largest commercial insurer. I’m quite conscious of the fact that the study hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal as yet, so I prefaced the talk with caveats about it being a pilot study – but it seems there isn’t much else in this area as yet, so Brake welcomed my data as a starting point for discussion. And if nothing else, it suggests more work is needed in this area.

The rest of the conference was really interesting too, with a number of presentations on campaigns such as the Think! campaign, ‘Talk to Frank’, and an innovative campaign in Scotland exploiting social media such as Facebook and MSN. Clearly there’s a lot of potential in this area, and whilst I’m trying to tap into some of it with this blog, I’m keen to learn more about harnessing it in my research and public engagement activities – so hopefully the blog will get slicker as time goes on!

Crash-proof cars!

I'm fortunate enough to be involved with various groups through my work with the Ergonomics Society, one of which is the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS), as I sit on their Vehicle Design Working Party. At our meeting this week, which was kindly hosted by Thatcham, we got to play with a bunch of new cars fitted with various advanced driver assistance systems.

I'm not going to risk my neck by naming manufacturers, but in short we were able to try a variety of collision mitigation and avoidance systems, as well as different variations on lane departure warning and lane-keeping assist systems. These particularly appealed to me as I'm interested in the effects of such automation on the driver and how the technologies interface with the human.

I've written a paper on how automotive automation can be divided into 'vehicle automation' and 'driving automation' - with the former being all those 'below the line' aspects, which don't impinge on the driver's conscious awareness (such as ABS or ESC), while the latter affect the more 'in your face' aspects of driving (such as ACC or lane-keeping systems). Collision mitigation is an awkward one as it can straddle the line - but in the cars we tried this week, the system only kicks in as a very last-minute attempt to save the day, way after the driver would respond, so in my opinion this falls just on the side of vehicle automation. So it was great to get the chance to try both sorts - and I'd like to share my own personal views on these.

On the whole, the collision mitigation systems were impressive, with successive generations improving on the last (and even a new prototype system that isn't on the market yet, which was widely viewed to be the best so far). Some of them had early warnings, like an icon on the dashboard or an auditory warning - which were really quite ineffectual in such emergency situations. The latest version improves somewhat on these by flashing a massive red light (pretty much a brake light) on your windscreen slightly in advance of intervening itself - giving you at least half a chance to respond.

There was much more variation in application - and opinion - for the lane departure systems though. Different manufacturers opted for different feedback options, whether that's a seat rumble, a steering wheel vibration, or an auditory warning; one manufacturer goes so far as to 'help' the driver by providing gentle resistance to get you back in lane. Personally I felt the steering wheel vibration was most ergonomic, as it's almost exactly what you'd get on a white line rumble strip - so very naturalistic and in line with drivers' expectations. The seat vibration came second for me, with its advantage of being directional (left buttock for left lane excursion and vice versa). I liked the lane-keeping assist, but I thought it was rather subtle and could easily be ignored by most drivers (it feels a bit like a road camber). The auditory warning again was least effective, giving no naturalistic relation to the task nor direction information.

Interface issues aside, the really interesting thing I noticed was the level of debate around the lane-keeping assist/departure warning systems as compared to the collision mitigation systems, with the latter meeting with universal approval from the group. Possibly this might have something to do with the more consistent interfaces, but I think there's also something in the vehicle/driving automation distinction, being as the collision mitigation systems were essentially below the line - like I said, way beyond the point of recovery for human reactions. It really was a safety net. Lane-keeping, on the other hand, was seen as still the driver's domain, and a lot of people were frustrated at the tactile feedback systems - despite these ostensibly being the most 'ergonomic'.

Ultimately, if we are to go down the route of crash-proofing cars through technology (which seems to be the trend - EuroNCAP now assess cars according to their crash avoidance technologies such as ESC), I think we do have to pay attention to the driver/vehicle distinction with automation, and be a lot more careful about how we implement driver automation.

Ergonomics Society Anniversary Conference

The highlight of this week has to be the Ergonomics Society 60th Anniversary Conference, held Wednesday and Thursday at the Royal College of Physicians just by The Regent’s Park in London.

Actually the festivities kicked off on Tuesday evening with a VIP reception, where we were showered with wine and nibbles and treated to a couple of top drawer speeches from Dr Ian Gibson, MP for Norwich North, and Professor Pieter Rookmaaker, President of the Federation of European Ergonomics Societies (FEES). Dr Gibson’s speech was particularly encouraging, being a member of the Innovation Universities and Skills Committee and someone who’s especially sympathetic to the ergonomics cause. Prof Rookmaaker also drew our attention to the first European Ergonomics conference to be held in Bruges from 10th October 2010 – surely a must-attend event.

Wednesday and Thursday were the main session days, where there were several plenary papers given by esteemed ergonomists from around the world, plus a bunch of interesting sessions on topics from public health, through human factors integration, to accidents and human error.

I teamed up with Prof Jan Noyes from Bristol and Dr Sarah Sharples from Nottingham to give a session on automation, which proved intimidatingly popular with standing room only at the back. One of those where you deliberately avoid looking at the audience for fear you’ll get stage fright. I also chaired a session on road ergonomics with papers from Dr Alex Stedmon (also at Nottingham), Nick Gkikas from Loughborough, and Dr Sandy Robertson of UCL.

Fergus Bisset (who was Twittering away during the conference) and I had a stand promoting the Real World Design exhibition at the Design Museum (see my blogpost here for more), which attracted good attention from the delegates and gave us some more ideas for exhibits in the medical and consumer product areas.

Socially it was great as well, always a good opportunity to catch up with old networks and make new ones, with a very posh dinner on Wednesday night courtesy of our hosts at the RCP. And let’s not forget the location – a glorious part of London, so quiet and leafy that you could easily forget you’re actually in the capital. The RCP itself was an excellent venue, especially the Dorchester Library where the VIP reception was held.

Next year’s conference reverts to the more traditional format – this one was special for the anniversary – and will be at Keele University in Staffordshire. Hopefully see you there!

Technological progress?

I was lucky enough to convince the powers-that-be at my university recently that I needed a new desktop computer for my office. The old beige box had really outlived its useful purpose and was becoming little more than an oversized, over-specced doorstop.

So I'm now the proud owner (well, looker-after) of a shiny new black box, which is much more reliable, faster, and doesn't hold the door open for me. Thing is, it came packaged with Microsoft Office 2007.

I'm quite certain that I'm not the first (nor will I be the last) to whinge about this online, but there probably won't be too many doing it from a qualified perspective. For those who haven't had the pleasure, it feels like the whole menu and interaction system has been changed, with tabs and buttons replacing our familiar menus, and an ethereal 'Office button' as a catch-all for everything general.

I gather it's an effort to make the respective software more usable - and in the long run that may well be the case (despite what I've said before in this blog about other companies, I would expect Microsoft to have teams of usability experts doing this job properly). It's just in the interim they've violated two core principles of usability - consistency and compatibility.

Consistency is about things working the same between and across systems. So if I turn this dial clockwise and the amount increases, I expect the same to happen if I turn that dial clockwise. Compatibility is similar, in that people build expectations about how stuff should work - either through experience with similar systems or just through natural qualities of the design.

So Microsoft spent years drumming us all into a mould for how Office works, only to throw most of it away with the latest evolution and (to the user, at least) start again. It's not compatible with how I've learned previous packages to work, and it's certainly not consistent with older versions. (Even the software formats are not compatible with each other - people sending 2007 documents to old-Office users often find them sent back because they can't be opened.)

I'm exaggerating slightly for theatrical effect - most of the functionality is still there, and in many cases enhanced. It's just how we access it that's changed. Familiar and frequently-used functions like Print and Undo are tucked away in hard to find places. Word Count has a spot of its own on the bottom information bar, but until you've found it you think it's disappeared as you can't find it in the menus (sorry, tabs).

Look, I'm sure I'll get used to this version in time and find it much more efficient. But they're asking their users to adapt (violating rule number one of ergonomics in my view) - possibly for the greater good in the long run, but that's a risk which could backfire (more usable alternatives to the QWERTY keyboard never took off because people were so used to the traditional layout). Nevertheless, product stereotypes have to be broken at some point, otherwise we'll never make progress - an ergonomic dilemma which is hard to resolve. In the meantime, I'll keep plugging away with Office 2007, and once I've figured out how to customise it, I'm sure it'll work better for me personally. Until then, though, I feel like I've taken a bit of a step backwards.

Satnav stories

I'm back on my horseless carriage this week, with two more stories about driving ergonomics in the news.

The first broke on Wednesday, as Sky News reported on the "Driver led to 100ft cliff edge by sat nav". We see these stories from time to time - whether it's driving up a one way street, driving into a river, or in this case nearly off a cliff - people blindly following the instructions from their gadget. It's an issue of trust in technology, which is widely discussed in the ergonomics literature.

Raja Parasuraman, one of the foremost authors on the topic, talks about 'use, misuse, disuse, and abuse' with technology (specifically, automation). If it seems too smart, we become overreliant and misuse it; if it keeps going wrong, we lose trust and misuse it. The abuse comes from designers and manufacturers who use technology for the sake of it without considering the user.

Now, the satnav is not automation, but it adds a layer of technology that has many benefits and disadvantages. For some users - and this may just be a trait rather than reflecting anything about their intelligence - there is an implicit faith in the technology. "It comes from a satellite, so it must be right", that kind of thing. It's almost like we suspend judgement when following instructions - and it could equally happen if it were a co-driver giving us directions, depending on how much you trusted their judgement (which is exactly the same point). Obviously it's less likely to happen if you were reading a map yourself - you'd probably take in all the information around you to make your decision.

Naturally, the law doesn't allow for suspension of judgement when in charge of a car, and on this occasion the driver faces a court case for driving without due care and attention. He may look back and laugh one day, but it could've been a lot worse.

Just to briefly touch on the second related story as it's just arrived in my inbox - Philadelphia is on the verge of joining a long list of US cities that have banned mobile phone use when driving, as reported here. I already talked about this a couple of weeks ago (see this post), so I won't labour the point. But I was particularly reassured by indications that the message is getting through - and I quote the Police Commissioner, "There is no debate, cell phones and driving do not mix." Quite right, as the plethora of ergonomics studies shows. Unfortunately this particular bill only relates to hand-held phone use, whereas the literature clearly demonstrates that hands-free is just as bad. If only we could have a precedent for banning hands-free...

Errornomics?!

I was intrigued and amused this week to see a book review in The Independent newspaper for "Why We Make Mistakes" by Joseph Hallinan, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, no less. Sounds great, I thought, and right up my street - a book on human error aimed at the pop science market.

At first glance it seems to tick all the boxes, too - talking about lapses of memory, optical illusions, and even medical errors that were down to equipment design. All very relevant to ergonomics. But hold on - did that word actually appear anywhere in the book?

It certainly didn't appear in the review, and the more I read, the more it irked me. This really is a book about ergonomics, but there is no reference to the underlying scientific discipline anywhere. The book (or the review, at least) actually has it wrong in places too - referring to the phenomenon of 'change blindness' (not by name, of course) as an ophthalmological problem - but it's actually about information processing and expectations, nothing to do with our visual acuity. And there are even some areas where it's treading on thin ice - for instance, the author's own claim that it's a "field guide to human error" ... well, I'm afraid Sidney Dekker wrote the Field Guide to Human Error, and he's a proper ergonomist.

The icing on the cake was when I read the plans for the UK release (later this year) to be titled 'Errornomics' (cashing in on the success of 'Freakonomics'). But for a consonant or two, he so nearly stumbled across the right word!

I'll probably end up giving it a read when it comes out in the UK, though I'm quite prepared to get wound up reading it (not least for the fact it'll be a case of "why didn't I do that"). I'm all for bringing this subject into the public consciousness, but I'd rather the source material were acknowledged. Could've been a chance to make 'ergonomics' a household word - alas, I fear the chance has been missed.