In this incessantly readable, groundbreaking work, Vincente makes vividly clear how we can bridge the widening gap between people and technology. He investigates every level of human activity - from simple matters such as our hand-eye coordination to complex human systems such as government regulatory agencies, and why businesses would benefit from making consumer goods easier to use. He shows us why we all have a vital stake in reforming the aviation industry, the health industry, and the way we live day-to-day with technology.
The Human Factor
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
'Vicente does lay out his revolutionary program with a clear, coherent structure of five design factors: political, organizational, team, psychological, and physical. Each is extensively explained and developed with many compelling and detailed examples' - Interantional Journal of Communication
'I believe in this book - I believe in its motivations and I believe it does an excellent job of trying to achieve them. We need more messengers like Vicente. Vive la revolution!' -Ergonomics
From the Inside Flap
What links the frustrations of daily life, like VCR clocks and voicemail systems, to airplane crashes and a staggering ?hidden epidemic? of medical error?
Kim Vicente is a professor of human factors engineering at the University of Toronto and a consultant to NASA, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and many other organizations; he might also be described as a ?technological anthropologist.? He spends his time in emergency rooms, airplane cockpits and nuclear power station control rooms -- as well as in kitchens, garages and bathrooms -- observing how people interact with technology.
In the first chapter of The Human Factor, Kim Vicente sets out the disturbing pattern he?s observed: from daily life to life-or-death situations, people are using technology that doesn?t take the human factor into account. Technologies as diverse as stove tops, hospital work schedules and airline cockpit controls lead to ?human error? because they neglect what people are like physically, psychologically, and in more complex ways. The results range from inconvenience to tragic loss of life.
How has this situation come about? The root cause of the problem, Vicente explains in the second chapter, is a ?two cultures? issue. There is a divide in the world of technological design -- just as there is in the world more generally -- between humanistic and mechanistic world-views. The humanistic view (in, say, cognitive psychology) deals with people in the abstract, ignoring that using tools is an integral human activity. The mechanistic view, on the other hand, forgets that it is real people who have to use the tools engineers develop. The two groups aren?t talking to each other: as the author puts it, ?our traditional ways of thinking have ignored -- and virtually made invisible -- the relationship between people and technology.?
As is often the case in human factors engineering, the solution is both revolutionary and, on the surface, simple: what we have to do is focus on the relationship between people and technology. Taking a cue from systems thinking, Kim Vicente argues that we should focus not just on better products or better practices, but the fit between them. What this means is not the development of more high-tech or low-tech articles, but a Human-tech revolution, where the human comes before the technological but the two are always linked.
In some areas the revolution is already at work: it?s not always the case that technology doesn?t take the human factor into account. When it does, as in the case of the Reach toothbrush, the Palm Pilot, or the ?critical incident? reporting method developed at the Philadelphia Children?s hospital, the technology is a success. The Fender stratocaster guitar became the favourite of musicians around the globe because it was designed with the needs of guitarists in mind, in everything from its overall shape to the position of its controls. The Human-tech Aviation Safety Reporting System, a way for pilots to confidentially report near-misses, has made air travel dramatically safer.
Technology as Kim Vicente understands it isn?t just the physical ?stuff? we use. In The Human Factor the word is used in a much broader sense, to include the physical and non-physical elements of complex systems. Information, teamwork, organizational structures and political decisions play a crucial role in determining how well a technological system as a whole functions. The ?Human-tech ladder? sets this out in more detail, and also provides the structure for the rest of the book. Design should begin by understanding a human or societal need, and then tailoring the technology to reflect what we know about human nature at the physical, psychological, team, organizational and political levels.
Kim Vicente offers a host of examples of technology relating to human needs poorly and well at each level. The physical is perhaps easiest to understand: a toothbrush that fits into hard to reach parts of the human mouth is better tailored to the human body than one that cannot. At the psychological level, technology has to take into account how people process and remember information, whether in designing voicemail systems or airport baggage checks. Poor Human-tech can be devastating. For example, awkwardly placed and uninformative gauges in the design of the control room at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station left even highly trained engineers uncertain as to the status of the reactor, contributing to the infamous accident there.
At the team level, the Cockpit Resource Management system is a way of training pilots to communicate and share responsibilities effectively. The way people work together is itself a form of technology that needs to run smoothly to avoid disastrous accidents, such as the time an Eastern Airlines jet crashed in Florida because the entire crew was distracted by the condition of an unimportant light bulb and no-one attended to flying the plane.
Kim Vicente discusses the human factor at the organizational level in chapter seven of The Human Factor. ?Soft? technology such as staffing levels and corporate culture can be designed so that an organization learns from its front-line staff. For instance, the medical community traditionally holds individual doctors and nurses responsible for mistakes. When things go wrong we tend to blame people -- when in fact they may have made heroic efforts to use poorly designed technology. Errors in hospitals are more often the result of systemic flaws: none is wholly at fault, but together they interact to cause accidents. At the Philadelphia Children?s hospital, the Human-tech solution is a system which encourages staff to make full reports on near-misses, and asks them to tell managers about potential dangers so that the hospital as a whole can institute protective measures. This critical incident technique led to a 90% reduction in medical mistakes at the hospital.
The final level of human nature which The Human Factor addresses is the political. Here, a Human-tech shows us that when political elements -- laws, funding, regulations -- ignore what we know about human nature, dangers arise. In the case of the E. coli tragedy in Walkerton, Ontario, Kim Vicente uncovers a host of ?system design? elements at the political level -- policy aims, legal regulations, budget allocations -- which interacted with environmental factors and staff incompetence to kill seven people and make thousands of others sick.
In conclusion, Kim Vicente feels that our civilization is at a crossroads: we have to change our relationship with technology to bring an end to technology-induced death and destruction, and start to improve the lives of everyone on the planet. The final chapter of The Human Factor sets out the ways we can regain control of our lives. As consumers, we can recognize and distinguish better designed products, and buy the more Human-tech ones. By participating actively in society we can remind people that ignoring the human factor, as happened at Walkerton, has terrible implications. In our workplaces we can all ensure that more human friendly technologies, hard and soft, predominate. Companies need to take a Human-tech approach to the rules and practices they institute, and design soft systems to guarantee that their employees have the competencies, information, goals and commitment to do their jobs. Other bodies, from the media to engineering schools can all play their part in making technology with a close affinity to human nature the norm rather than a rarity: a better world will be the inevitable result.
From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Kim Vicente is a professor of human factors engineering at the University of Toronto and a consultant to NASA, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and many other organizations; he might also be described as a ?technological anthropologist.? He spends his time in emergency rooms, airplane cockpits and nuclear power station control rooms -- as well as in kitchens, garages and bathrooms -- observing how people interact with technology.
In the first chapter of The Human Factor, Kim Vicente sets out the disturbing pattern he?s observed: from daily life to life-or-death situations, people are using technology that doesn?t take the human factor into account. Technologies as diverse as stove tops, hospital work schedules and airline cockpit controls lead to ?human error? because they neglect what people are like physically, psychologically, and in more complex ways. The results range from inconvenience to tragic loss of life.
How has this situation come about? The root cause of the problem, Vicente explains in the second chapter, is a ?two cultures? issue. There is a divide in the world of technological design -- just as there is in the world more generally -- between humanistic and mechanistic world-views. The humanistic view (in, say, cognitive psychology) deals with people in the abstract, ignoring that using tools is an integral human activity. The mechanistic view, on the other hand, forgets that it is real people who have to use the tools engineers develop. The two groups aren?t talking to each other: as the author puts it, ?our traditional ways of thinking have ignored -- and virtually made invisible -- the relationship between people and technology.?
As is often the case in human factors engineering, the solution is both revolutionary and, on the surface, simple: what we have to do is focus on the relationship between people and technology. Taking a cue from systems thinking, Kim Vicente argues that we should focus not just on better products or better practices, but the fit between them. What this means is not the development of more high-tech or low-tech articles, but a Human-tech revolution, where the human comes before the technological but the two are always linked.
In some areas the revolution is already at work: it?s not always the case that technology doesn?t take the human factor into account. When it does, as in the case of the Reach toothbrush, the Palm Pilot, or the ?critical incident? reporting method developed at the Philadelphia Children?s hospital, the technology is a success. The Fender stratocaster guitar became the favourite of musicians around the globe because it was designed with the needs of guitarists in mind, in everything from its overall shape to the position of its controls. The Human-tech Aviation Safety Reporting System, a way for pilots to confidentially report near-misses, has made air travel dramatically safer.
Technology as Kim Vicente understands it isn?t just the physical ?stuff? we use. In The Human Factor the word is used in a much broader sense, to include the physical and non-physical elements of complex systems. Information, teamwork, organizational structures and political decisions play a crucial role in determining how well a technological system as a whole functions. The ?Human-tech ladder? sets this out in more detail, and also provides the structure for the rest of the book. Design should begin by understanding a human or societal need, and then tailoring the technology to reflect what we know about human nature at the physical, psychological, team, organizational and political levels.
Kim Vicente offers a host of examples of technology relating to human needs poorly and well at each level. The physical is perhaps easiest to understand: a toothbrush that fits into hard to reach parts of the human mouth is better tailored to the human body than one that cannot. At the psychological level, technology has to take into account how people process and remember information, whether in designing voicemail systems or airport baggage checks. Poor Human-tech can be devastating. For example, awkwardly placed and uninformative gauges in the design of the control room at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station left even highly trained engineers uncertain as to the status of the reactor, contributing to the infamous accident there.
At the team level, the Cockpit Resource Management system is a way of training pilots to communicate and share responsibilities effectively. The way people work together is itself a form of technology that needs to run smoothly to avoid disastrous accidents, such as the time an Eastern Airlines jet crashed in Florida because the entire crew was distracted by the condition of an unimportant light bulb and no-one attended to flying the plane.
Kim Vicente discusses the human factor at the organizational level in chapter seven of The Human Factor. ?Soft? technology such as staffing levels and corporate culture can be designed so that an organization learns from its front-line staff. For instance, the medical community traditionally holds individual doctors and nurses responsible for mistakes. When things go wrong we tend to blame people -- when in fact they may have made heroic efforts to use poorly designed technology. Errors in hospitals are more often the result of systemic flaws: none is wholly at fault, but together they interact to cause accidents. At the Philadelphia Children?s hospital, the Human-tech solution is a system which encourages staff to make full reports on near-misses, and asks them to tell managers about potential dangers so that the hospital as a whole can institute protective measures. This critical incident technique led to a 90% reduction in medical mistakes at the hospital.
The final level of human nature which The Human Factor addresses is the political. Here, a Human-tech shows us that when political elements -- laws, funding, regulations -- ignore what we know about human nature, dangers arise. In the case of the E. coli tragedy in Walkerton, Ontario, Kim Vicente uncovers a host of ?system design? elements at the political level -- policy aims, legal regulations, budget allocations -- which interacted with environmental factors and staff incompetence to kill seven people and make thousands of others sick.
In conclusion, Kim Vicente feels that our civilization is at a crossroads: we have to change our relationship with technology to bring an end to technology-induced death and destruction, and start to improve the lives of everyone on the planet. The final chapter of The Human Factor sets out the ways we can regain control of our lives. As consumers, we can recognize and distinguish better designed products, and buy the more Human-tech ones. By participating actively in society we can remind people that ignoring the human factor, as happened at Walkerton, has terrible implications. In our workplaces we can all ensure that more human friendly technologies, hard and soft, predominate. Companies need to take a Human-tech approach to the rules and practices they institute, and design soft systems to guarantee that their employees have the competencies, information, goals and commitment to do their jobs. Other bodies, from the media to engineering schools can all play their part in making technology with a close affinity to human nature the norm rather than a rarity: a better world will be the inevitable result.
From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This was one of those books that is totally effortless to read. I attribute this to Kim Vicente's obvious passion for what he does, and his interesting ideas, research, and teaching, but most of all to his extraordinary ability to express himself.
I've read many similar books, like Normal Accidents, Human Error, and most of Donald A. Norman's books, and enjoyed them all, but this one was probably the most enjoyable. It's very logical and well-designed, and does a great job of clearly explaining past disasters like Chernobyl and TMI. I was especially enthralled, as well as appalled, by the description of the Walkerton Ontario public water disaster as an example of a system failure. This was the first I heard of that one.
His recommendations and predictions for the way forward are eminently sensible and practical. I especially liked the possibility of instituting anonymous incident reporting systems like the Aviation Safety Reporting System in medicine and industry.
But most of all I'm very glad that such an excellent thinker, author, and teacher is following up and developing the groundbreaking and critically important work of Jens Rasmussen.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
With an open, friendly style, Vicente manages to explore the use - and misuse - of technology all around us, from our day-to-day life to critical systems like health care and nuclear plants. Vicente has a gift for weaving a web and linking elements from seemingly unrelated fields and linking them together in a thoroughly convincing manner. As he himself advocates here, the author has not written this book to assign blame for the current "bad fit" between technology-for-its-own-sake and people, but instead focuses on laying a groundwork towards a more balanced, manageable and safe design and application of technology.
This fascinating, engaging book is a must-read for anyone whose car has grown too complicated, whose VCR keeps blinking 12:00, or who feels that technology has got out of hand. It's probably not the best book for someone about to undergo a stay in hospital...
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Ever since Charlie Chaplin parodied automation in Modern Times, we have known what happens when we ignore the human factor in technology, but we continue to produce dangerous and unusable devices.
Dr Vicente, a professor of human factors engineering, claims that we need to define technology in much broader terms than we usually do in order to avoid a "Cyclopean fixation on either mechanistic or humanistic world views." We need, in fact, to consider the entire legal, psychological, organizational and political environment in which technology is embedded. The author calls this approach Human-tech.
Consider that one of the reasons that hospitals continue to kill patients, even after badly designed equipment is identified, is that medical personnel dare not openly admit error, because of the severe career and legal consequences. This type of problem goes beyond traditional technical design issues of usability or ergonomics.
Ultimately, Dr Vicente is optimistic that we can and will resolve these problems. He offers the commercial airline industry as an example. In 2001, despite the horrendous murders on September 11th, the total number of major airline crashes was fewer than in any year since World War II. What the aviation industry did for commercial flights, we can do for our healthcare system, airport security, or anything we want to turn our hand to.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Review for The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live with...
I bought this book for my college class, but this book is very interesting. If you like cognitive science, or are interested in learning about the relationship between people and... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Tiffany L
An Excellent Overview for Anyone Dealing with Technology
Dr. Vicente presents the interaction of technology and people in a clear, concise, and easy to read way. Read more
Published on February 17, 2010 by Brad Allen
not an original idea
Human-tech is a phrase Vicente supposedly coined...however, it is a phrase found throughout the human factors profession and is even the name of a human factors company. Read more
Published on June 27, 2004
A scientific and social assessment of modern technology
Modern technology may ably supply the equipment and new convenience features people desire, but lacks the ability to consider or correct human error in using it. Read more
Published on May 2, 2004 by Midwest Book Review
so you say you want a revolution......
This book describes all the frustrations I've ever had with technology that is supposed to improve my work and my life. Read more
Published on October 16, 2003 by michele
An Eye Opening and Common Sense Approach to Technology
We're ready for the Human-tech revolution! This book is extremely relevant today and attacks the issue of techology throwing our lives into chaos with common sense. Read more
Published on October 16, 2003
What was the point?
Probably a good book in the abstract but for those of us in the real world, not very useful. The book is out-of-touch with reality and seems to take on a niave, inexperienced... Read more
Published on September 18, 2003 by Jill
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Just before midnight on Friday, April 25, 1986, Leonid Toptunov was about to begin the graveyard shift in the control room of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power station located near Chernobyl, just 130 kilometres northeast of Kiev and 600 kilometres southwest of Moscow. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
affinity with human nature, transitional instability, enhancing patient safety, phone message systems, complex technological systems, salient feedback, airport security systems, designing technology, management matters, human factors engineers, medical error, everyday technologies Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Stan Koebel, New York, Magic Roundabout, Ministry of the Environment, Three Mile Island, World War, Palm Beach County, Fender Strat, Robert Wright, Ryan Bishop, Power Pig, Adam Smith, Charles Billings, Common Sense Revolution, Courtney Braund, Cyclopean Mechanistic, East Coast, Sun Tzu, Walkerton Public Utilities Commission, Cal Tech, Leo Beltracchi, Los Angeles, Lucian Leape, United Airlines New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Just before midnight on Friday, April 25, 1986, Leonid Toptunov was about to begin the graveyard shift in the control room of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power station located near Chernobyl, just 130 kilometres northeast of Kiev and 600 kilometres southwest of Moscow. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
affinity with human nature, transitional instability, enhancing patient safety, phone message systems, complex technological systems, salient feedback, airport security systems, designing technology, management matters, human factors engineers, medical error, everyday technologies Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Stan Koebel, New York, Magic Roundabout, Ministry of the Environment, Three Mile Island, World War, Palm Beach County, Fender Strat, Robert Wright, Ryan Bishop, Power Pig, Adam Smith, Charles Billings, Common Sense Revolution, Courtney Braund, Cyclopean Mechanistic, East Coast, Sun Tzu, Walkerton Public Utilities Commission, Cal Tech, Leo Beltracchi, Los Angeles, Lucian Leape, United Airlines New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 43
books:
See all 43 books this book cites
3
books
cite this book:
- The Psychology Of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman on 6 pages
- Cockpit Resource Management by Earl L. Wiener on 4 pages
- The Wealth of Nations (Bantam Classics) by Adam Smith on page 49, page 247, and Back Matter
- Hal Leonard The Fender Stratocaster by A.R. Duchossoir on page 77, page 80, and Back Matter
- Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright in Front Matter, page 39, and Back Matter
See all 43 books this book cites
- Taming HAL: Designing Interfaces Beyond 2001 by Asaf Degani in Back Matter
- Handbook of Wireless Local Area Networks: Applications, Technology, Security, and Standards (Internet and Communications) by Mohammad Ilyas on page 263
- Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy by Candace Havens on page 15
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