Ergonomics Books

Written by 3 leading experts from Denmark's Riso National Laboratory, this book contains a deep and wide-ranging discussion of human-computer-interaction, especially with regard to the design of information systems. Included are chapters on work domain/task situation/ user profile combinations, methodolgies, ecological information systems, activity analysis, and field studies in libraries

If you are an organization in a developing or underdeveloping country getting into ergonomics for the first time, this text is for you. Most of the 100+ guidelines are tailored for the less advanced organizations in the manufacturing industries where there is still a whole lot of manual labor.

The text is pitched at the non-ergonomic sophisticated user. It is easy to read and understand.

This book is very helpful to student OT's. I found the book to be very useful for completing job analysees and tasks. The measurements given in the book are very helpful as well as the format to follow for conducting job analysees.

The book did not give enough information on how to provide specific recommendations for problems. But that would be too easy! If you're an OT, you should be able to come with recommendations yourself!

This is one book I did NOT sell back to the bookstore at the end of the year. I know I will be using it again and again.

WOW, if you want something easy and accurate about ergonmics this is it! I have read tons of literature on ergonomics, and decided to use this book for my introductory ergonomic course. Any one can pick up this book and understand the information.

Fitting The Task To The Man

This book is highly recommended for anyone that is interested in ergonomics. This book covers many physiological and psychological aspects of work design, as well as environmental considerations, manual materials handling considerations, etc. This book contains many figures and illustrations to assist the reader in ergonomic and work design principles. The book may be a difficult read at times, but it does provide a great deal of useful information.

This is a very good functional decomposition of the major elements of the ATC system, focusing on the work structure and systemic tasks of the humans and the equipment that comprise the system. The later chapters introducing the concepts of automation and the attendant potential benefits and risks of different automation strategies are critical for understanding the follow-on book, "The Future of Air Traffic Control: Human Factors and Automation". Both these works serve as the major rationale for selecting the "human-centered" approach to automation.

This book is written for the "lay-man" interested in ATC and automation. There are a few over-simplifications, but I cannot imagine how better to describe the general functions without getting excessively technical.

One minor "ding": Boeing's former competition in airframe manufacture was not "McDonald Douglas" (Overview, page 28), but "McDonnell-Douglas".

Book approachs the subjects in a more practical and information giving manner. I made used it in my studies very effectively.

The book is a useful and handy guide to applying human factor methods to reduce accidents in safety critical systems. Human error is the major cause of accidents in safety critical safety industries like aviation, nuclear power and chemical. Accidents are often the end result of a myriad of latent and active failures, only the last of which are the unsafe acts of the operator. It is necessary to identify these active and latent failures in order to understand why the mishap occurred and how it might be prevented from happening again in the future.

Active failures are the actions or inactions of operators that are believed to cause the accident. These can arise from operator error, among others, and they are the last "unsafe acts" committed by an operator, often with immediate and tragic consequences. For example, forgetting to lower the landing gear before touch down will yield relatively immediate, and potentially grave, consequences for an aircraft.
In contrast, latent failures are errors committed by individuals within the working areas or elsewhere in the supervisory chain of command that affect the tragic sequence of events characteristic of an accident. For example, letting someone work for say 24 hours without rest, can lead to fatigue and ultimately errors (active failures) in a department. Viewed from this perspective then, the unsafe acts of personnel are the end result of a long chain of causes whose roots originate in other parts (often the upper echelons) of the organization. The problem is that these latent failures may lie dormant or undetected for hours, days, weeks, or longer until one day they bite the unsuspecting operator.

This is a useful book that is recommended for all personnel and regulators who deal with safety critical systems. This book will be a crucial and handy guide and reference for anyone who applies human factors in their day by day work, giving them ready-to-use tools and methods that can be applied to prevent incidents and accidents.

In the 1940s, automation in the Welsh coal mines resulted in a decrease, not an increase, in productivity. In the 1950s General Motors opened a new, highly-automated automobile plant that couldn't turn out any cars because the workers wouldn't show up to work in it. These two cases were among the earliest applications of sociotechnical systems analysis: the concept that the most effective work system is not that with the most efficient technical systems but that with the best balance of the technical and the social systems that results in the greatest actual productivity. The three key principles of socio-tech are:

1. Introduction of technology changes the entire work system. Therefore you should design the new work system first and then design the technology to accomplish the desired change.

2. Technology is only cost effective if it fundamentally changes the work sytem to reduce non-value-added work and increase the productivity of the outcomes of the organization, not just production of the artifacts of how things were done before.

3. Technically efficient tools are not the goal; we are after a total work system that enables productive workers.

Information Technology and Organisational Change by British author Ken Eason (hence the British spelling of "organisational") is a seminal work in applying the concepts of sociotechnical systems analysis to information systems. He starts with an analysis of the information age, and discusses the fact that, unlike the agriculture age and the industrial age, the information age is being shaped by millions of individual system design decisions, and that most of these decisions are being made based on local efficiency with little thought to the age that is being created. He prescribes sociotechnical analysis as one remedy for this tendency.

This is followed with a review of the ways in which information systems might add value to an organization, and one by one shows how the potential is difficult to realize, leaving us with only tho! se uses of information technology that create fundamental change in the entire work system as being worth the investment of time, talent, and money. In this he echoes strongly Michael Hammer's work showing business-intensive systems as being where 80% or more of our systems development efforts should go. A review of traditional, structured, participative, and end-used design and development methods helps the project sponsor to pick the design method best suited to the organisational change s/he desires.

The remaining eight chapters of this book work through designing the process, forming the design team, and the steps of doing sociotechnical design ,development, and implementation. In using this book with graduate-level classes in business information systems, it is generally conceded that the language and the newness of ideas make it a difficult book to read, but that the material covered make it worth the effort.

I bought a few copies of this book for new people who may not be related to our usability group but may need to understand what the disipline is all about.

I thought it did a great job of teaching this topic to people who have never seen this stuff before. In fact the people who read it really enjoyed it. Its something like 100 pages long, so its a quick read.

My only beef is the fact that each page has about a zillion words on it, and its easier for me to scream though a book if I feel like I have forward momentum, if even only because I'm flipping pages with relatively few words on it.