Using Soft Systems Methodology to Elicit User Requirements for Adapting a Socio-technical System
Pre-MSc Background:
Counselling, career guidance, training research/development, sales
Pre-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
As an emergent domain in Cognitive Psychology
Post-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
As a buoyantly emergent domain in Cognitive Psychology with potential both for improving organisational performance and for being abused by managers, inclined to indulge the dark side of their power.
Subsequent-to-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
As a domain in social, economic and organisational behaviour with enormous potential for improvement and for exploitation.
Additional Reflections:
Teaching and academic supervision on the MSc (Ergonomics) in University College London 1995/6 introduced me to a robust approach to applied research. While it took me quite some time to figure out how to apply this approach in the sphere of work in which I have since concentrated – Safety Psychology and Ergonomics.
The course was a positively transformative experience beyond my expectations, by virtue of the quality of teaching and generous supervision, formal and informal, in the ‘learning community,’ facilitated by so many inspiring staff.
Inclusiveness remains another marked feature of the course for me: 15 years before The Equality Act 2010, diversity of several kinds was evident in the student group. I still smile when I recall the occasion of acute stress I experienced after I created a portrait with twelve flags for an end-of-term celebration and found myself very sharply challenged by a normally very placid and amiable fellow, who strongly objected to the inclusion of the national flag of one Middle Eastern country, while omitting that of his own. I quickly amended the portrait to include the thirteenth.
For the information (and amusement) of students from other years, the end of term celebration in question included the presentation to Professor Long of a certificate, which read as follows:
The Tri-cycles and HIC Unit 95/96 bestow on
Professor John Long
Master of the House
A certificate of Special Merit for his intellectual leadership and linguistic prowess –
That surpasseth all understanding.
The last phrase might ring a bell or two for many students. However, John assures me that the certificate, now framed, continues to have pride of place in his kitchen.
Project Title: Safety, Job Satisfaction and Mental Workload: A Comparison of Two Contrasting (London Underground) Lines
Pre-MSc Background: BSc Psychological Sciences (Psychology and Biology) but struggled to find a related career.
Pre-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics: A vocational use of Psychology
Post-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
The MSc immediately allowed me to practice Ergonomics. I’ve been employed in that field ever since – its great to be paid to do something I believe in. The terms ‘Human Factors’ and ‘Ergonomics’ seem to be poorly defined. Whilst Human Factors used to encompass Ergonomics, now the terms are interchangeable. I’ve still never heard a good succinct definition of Ergonomics! In my experience, non-ergonomists typically underestimate the scope of the discipline. We still need to keep fighting for greater recognition and understanding of the benefits of Ergonomics.
– Present (1 year 5 months)Responsible for managing a large team of experienced human factors consultants. The team currently provides human factors expertise for clients in the Defence, Rail and Nuclear industries. Quintec is the leading edge of Thales consulting in the UK, providing management, systems and technology consultancy services to clients who need to deliver technically challenging and complex projects.
– (5 years 9 months)Professional head of human factors/ergonomics for Tube Lines, (later London Underground), managing a team of human factors professionals of various levels of experience. Responsible for maintaining & developing the competence of those individuals and ensuring all work conducted by the company was compliant with human factors standards & best practice. The majority of the work pertained to London Underground station refurbishments; train design; signalling control centre design; software design, incident investigation and input to safety cases.
Evaluating the Usability of Laptop Computers (Sponsored by British Telecom, Ipswich)
Pre-MSc Background:
B.E. Mechanical Engineering (University of Roorkee, Roorkee, India)
Design Training programme at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, India
Pre-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
Between 1981 and 1984, I studied (Classical) Ergonomics on my own and applied this in my teaching at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad India. I had no knowledge of HCI and Cognitive Ergonomics at this time.
Post-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
In my view the inputs in HCI and Cognitive Ergonomics were ahead of time in 1984-85. Cognitive Ergonomics immensely helped me in understanding the fallibility of human-decision making and action taking in complex and dynamic real-life situations. These inputs later led me to develop a human-centred systems approach for problem solving in our business environments. This is an easy to apply approach useful for engineers, designers and business managers.
Subsequent-to-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics
I strongly feel that Cognitive Ergonomics is a discipline which must be taught to all the major decision makers in Education, Industry, Business, and Government. This will enable decision makers and managers to understand why so many man-made systems fail or do not perform as desired and expected. Problem solving with an understanding of the cognitive processes of humans in a target context will help evolve and implement more workable and sustainable solutions.
Additional Reflections
Educational frameworks in engineering, and business management are too narrowly focused on technology and selling respectively. However, in real-life, any user or consumer would ideally like to have a product or service that is well-integrated across aesthetics, usability, technical performance, and affordability. A collaborative and interdisciplinary problem solving approach is the key to design and manage an appropriate value to a user. Cognitive science, ergonomics, and systems thinking (which are rarely taught to the professional problem solvers) are an essential component of a holistic and integrative problem solving process.
Professor John Long has influenced me in a very significant way by leading me into the realm of cognitive science and ergonomics. This was a life changing phase particularly in the 1980s when HCI and Cognitive ergonomics were in a nascent stage (there were no books on these subjects at that time!). Back in India, these terms were totally alien even to those who were in the field of ergonomics and design. I sincerely thank Prof. John for always encouraging me, and for appreciating my work during the programme at UCL. Although I would have liked to work further at a deeper level in the area of Cognitive Ergonomics and Systems Thinking, I still could manage to contribute to the development of a new paradigm for the Industrial Design process at the educational as well as professional levels. A large body of students and working designers benefited from this new way of looking at design (it was usually aesthetics and style focused). In the 1990s a significant number of my design students joined and influenced usability and user experience design initiative of the Indian IT industry, inspired by my inputs in design projects.
Most of my thoughts, beliefs and professional work are and will continue to be based on cognitive ergonomics and systems thinking in design and management.
1996/97 James Sinclairhttps://www.hci-site-experiments.co.uk/wp-content/themes/engic/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg150150JohnJohnhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d46e5c6154304cf75a0c2d0059f249ab2204a9e4e458b1e88aaaa9e322763c85?s=96&d=mm&r=g
JL – I always remember James as a very creative and self-possessed student. An unusual combination. When inviting him to contribute his MSc Reflections, I wrote: ‘Feel free to do something novel – that was always your forte, as I remember’. He seems to have taken me at my word – no answers to my questions, for example. Also, I am not sure that I have got the hang of this horse-racing thing. Have you? For the purposes in hand, however, James was my horse and I have won (I think…..). Thanks James, much appreciated.
To which James replied:
Hi John
that made me smile, I love the idea of being a horse and it was fun to do. And, I didn’t mention it, but I was lucky falling into HCI at the time I did as its made a big difference to my life.
I did the course at the end of the 90’s. I hadn’t any practical experience with computers but had a background in psychology, philosophy and art, and as it turned out this was a pretty good combo for HCI. More luck than planning.
I enjoyed the course and the people I met. I thought it was like a foundation course as I got to sample lots of different bits and pieces. There are a few things that have stuck with me; we had a practical design fortnight where we had to complete a project, from concept to prototype. This was great fun, very stimulating and really useful. I came a way feeling that the course should do more of this. All the computing elements were good as I was keen to learn more about this. I found the introduction to programming especially useful as I hadn’t done anything like this before. It’s fun making stuff that works and this really helps when it comes to testing and communicating and idea. And then there was John’s Engineering approach. I liked the idea but thought, as I did with a lot of the HCI stuff, that there was a little too much emphasis on the method and process rather than doing. I felt at the time that by focusing so much on how to go about a thing gets in the way of doing it.
Ok, so how has this translated to work. Well a lot of what I currently do has an engineer-ish (sorry John I can remember the exact definition, but I feel I’m sticking to the spirit of the thing) quality. By this I mean we make changes for a reason, measure the impact and make adjustments based on the feedback.
I work for commercial clients who generally want to sell more. This, for me, involves running quite a lot of live tests, AB, Multivariate and personalisation. In short, creating alternate versions of a web page, splitting the traffic so that different users are given different pages and measuring the results. The goal is always to outperform the what is currently there or (the default page). Oh, and personalisation isn’t as grand as it sounds. Its a great word as it immediately conjures up in clients minds a world were every customer is dealt with on a one to one basis, bespoke tailoring always pops into my head when I hear it. The reality is, we operate at in broader strokes, you are a return visitor, or you are at university, then this is for you.
When I started doing live testing I was not particularly well informed. From chatting to others, who knew a bit more than me, I was open to the idea that what I would consider to be a well designed page had little baring on what would work. I had been shown pages that were truly ugly, not well organised and had nothing that looked there was a sense of purpose behind them, but had apparently performed miraculously. So God is not a designer?
The first few years of running these tests were emotionally exhausting. Sometimes we (me, project manager and client) would get lucky, most the time we wouldn’t. We would set a test live and then watch the results day by day . It’s like gambling at the race track, I’m not a gambler, but you pick your favourite and then watch it go. Horse racing is probably more rational, horses have form, this was a crazy horse race, a horse race organised by the Marx brothers. We would see a particular design top the results table for week. When we returned on Monday morning the picture had reversed. This happened time and time again. What made it more frustrating was that the current winner had hit a level of significance where it would be reasonable to call it (as a winner), 95%, or 99% and in some cases higher. Not so much engineering, more the occult , Black Magic perhaps. We got to the point that when our horse was winning, we wanted to stop the race. Definitely not engineering.
This left me feeling like I wanted to get out of the live testing business. We lost a few project managers along the way, and client side there was quite a bit of shuffling. However I didn’t have much choice so I started chatting with a colleague and scratching my head. I wondered what would a test look like if it we just ran the same design but showed it to different groups? Then after some more chatting, my colleague helped me realise that I didn’t need to run the test, I could simulate it. The basic ingredients of one of these tests is a number of experiences ( we have run tests from 3 – 128 variations of a page ), each assigned to a group of users ( once a user is allocated to an experience this is the only experience they will see), and measured against some metric ( how many tickets purchased). So with a bit of Java Script I built a simulation to see what the results of this test would look like if there were absolutely no variation in the pages shown. All I had to do is plug in the number of variations, the size of the population ( how much traffic will see the test) and the baseline conversion rate. And voila, what you get is a Marx brothers horse race. Great fun, but not good for the nerves.
Here is the simulation, so that you can have a go yourselves. It should give you an idea of the range of variation you can get due to the sample. Play around with the numbers, hit the refresh button a few times, and see how often you can get a significant result (any thing above 95% confidence) by essential doing nothing.
The key to this is random distribution. As we can’t control the who sees each experience, we have to assign them randomly in order to remove any sampling bias. Our population that gets randomly assigned to a particular group will be made up of convertors and non-convertors. Some groups will have more convertors, others less. One of these groups will be our default. It could be at the top of the list or at the bottom, who knows? The uplift (positive or negative) is calculated off the default. As its random, it changes each time we run it, this week my horse is winning, next week its some one else’s. I call this simulation the Black Magic box. So in the words of Forest Gump, “Live testing is like a box of chocolates”.
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Halimahtun Mohd Khalid PhDhttps://www.hci-site-experiments.co.uk/wp-content/themes/engic/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg150150JohnJohnhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d46e5c6154304cf75a0c2d0059f249ab2204a9e4e458b1e88aaaa9e322763c85?s=96&d=mm&r=g
HCI was an emerging discipline and very little was published in the literature. At that time the prevailing interest was CHI which focused on design of computer systems for interacting with users. Physical Ergonomics was well established, while Cognitive Ergonomics was almost unknown. Cognitive Science was well documented especially Psychology. The application of Cognitive Psychology to Ergonomics problems in order to understand the design of user interfaces of products and systems became an exciting area for research. The Ergonomics Unit at UCL was a pioneer in Cognitive Ergonomics.
Post-PhD View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
The initial development of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics in UK bears the mark of Professor John Long, who took the discipline to a higher level. His emphasis on theory development in all PhD work suggests his important contribution to theory-building and methods development. His students may not have lived up to his expectations, but the seeds of reason have been sowed and created a new challenge and mindset for the transformed centre, UCL Interaction Centre, or UCLIC.
The first Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction by Martin Helander appeared in 1988. The contents were still CHI-driven with contributions from scientists in the Computer Science field.
The early works of the Ergonomics Unit (prior to UCLIC) emphasised on HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics in various application domains, including: teleshopping, training, postal services, naval displays & control, computer aided design. All of this contributed to the growing discipline.
The concept of usability emerged in tandem with better understanding of user interface design. Multimedia too became an important research area for HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics.
Subsequent-to-PhD View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
Today the discipline has expanded ubiquitously. But Theory development has not expanded much. Many theories and methods are still borrowed from the Behavioural Sciences, in particular Psychology. There is no theory of HCI!
The literature in this area is based on research which is not grounded in theory, relative to research in psychology. The rigour of scientific research lags behind the desire to produce quick results for the sake of publication.
There is a need for experts in HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics to come together and focus on theory development to support rapid development in computer and communications technologies. Products and systems are getting more difficult to use, especially for the aged population.
Additional Reflections:
I was introduced to HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics in 1985 when I presented a paper at the Ergonomics Society conference at the University of Nottingham. John Long, the guru, who became my supervisor afterwards, presented papers on design of naval information displays and also on teleshopping. I was at first indecisive if I should be a candidate for the doctoral program at his Ergonomics Unit (EU). I was dressed in my formal traditional Malay costume, unlike the rest of the delegates who were casual. Many thoughts must have gone through his mind as he scrutinised me. It all changed dramatically when he heard me talk for the first time. I responded confidently to his line of questioning over my previous MSc work on central task complexity and peripheral vision.
My early days at UCL began with a series of interviews by Andy Whitefield, Andrew Life, and Dan Diaper. I asked them what it was like to work with John. They smiled and I understood that it was tough but rewarding.
Today, I am living proof of John Long’s rigorous and impactful training. The PhD program was specially designed to impart knowledge and skills as well as shared values and experiences. His style puts him apart from those I had trained with earlier. He presented no answers to my work but only questions and more questions. This helped me to develop an inquiring and reflective approach; also to think out of the box. At times his high workload distanced him from the supervisory role. But in turn I became groomed to be self-reliant, directed, and focused.
The PhD candidates were an integral part of the EU family. We attended monthly meetings to deliver progress report, and to be assigned tasks on rotational basis so as to develop multi-tasking skills. The tasks enriched our experiences in communication, organization, and documentation, which became useful and valuable when we embarked on our career. The requirement to follow some of the exciting MSc site visits enhanced our problem-solution skills, such as visits to the London underground, coal mine, hospital, London Design Council, to name but a few.
While I do not consume alcohol, the numerous pub crawls on Fridays, exposed me to the British way of life, and more importantly, to get to know the growing ‘family’ as the Unit accepted more graduate students. John and his beloved late wife, Doris, also hosted several alumni gatherings at his beautiful home in Muswell Hill. The concept of networking and social programming emerged from his purposeful convictions.
Despite the challenging and stressful environment of London and UCL, I completed my training within the three year timeline to accomplish my dream as the first foreign PhD student at EU. The greatest achievement was to obtain my PhD in Cognitive Ergonomics from the University College London, and to be supervised by Professor John Long and Dr. Andy Whitefield. I am proud to have them as my mentors.
I owe my successes today to John Long’s vision and dedication that crafted a future of curiosity and motivation for HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics research. The training program that I graduated from was a benchmark for quality work.
I wish John soul-searching happiness and continued good health, and the evolved UCL Interaction Centre a stimulating future.
Project Title: An Ergonomic Evaluation of Ice (Water) Cooling Garments
Pre-MSc Background: RGN General Nurse, BSc (Hons) Psychology
Pre-MSc background of HCI: Well, it was almost a whole new subject for me and my initial reflections when reading my MSc were, that is what I wanted to do! Lot of medical technology was starting to move towards use of software and poor design issues had prompted me to want to read Ergonomics. Ian Ross who also graduated from EU and my senior and a peer from my undergrad days asked me to check the UCL course out.
I remember visiting the department for my interview and I met Prof Long and Rachel and I was wowed and even more excited, when offered a place on the course.
Of note were the social events both at John’s home in North London with his wife, Doris, and the Christmas parties held at the Royal Free, where we were entertained by Steve Pheasant (who sadly passed away at a young age), playing the saxophone and Don Grieve playing the piano. Ivan Brown and Paul Branton were amazing to listen to, too, with some of the research techniques used by them in their studies, which today would make the ethics committee shiver with fear!
Fond memories of being wowed by Rachel’s work reside in my memory and the site visits certainly made the course practical and interesting. EU at the time in many respects, was at the forefront of HCI and certainly some of the theories and concepts clearly developed around that time: of note is the Conception for HCI, but I must say I am embarrassed to admit I cannot remember what that was about. Perhaps a coffee with Prof and /or Johnny Dowell may jog the grey matter into action.
My MSc year went in a flash and it was a year of work hard and play hard. Prof Long’s inaugural lecture took place that year and we had an intriguingly bright bunch of students, included amongst them were the likes of Leon Straker, now Professor at Curtin, and Mark Andrew, now residing and working in Australia, doing consultancy work and writing plays.
Socialising was not only restricted to the faculty, but I also remember the fond times spent with Steve Howard at his flat in Leyton (who sadly died suddenly last year).
That Prof Long was an intellectual would be an understatment, sitting in his lectures not only inspired the students but at times left them taking a double take and still not comprehending what had been said. John though was an amazing man to be taught by and he was particularly supportive of all his students.
Post MSc:
As it would have it, my first job as an ergonomist was working on the Type 3 Frigate Command and Control System. I soon got offered a job at CCD Design and Ergonomics, where we looked at the application of HCI on a range of projects; but my work was predominantly on conventional ergonomics and HF.
There are many fond moments and people that I could reflect on and talk about. The time spent at EU helped me with a career change and has finally also enabled me to explore the application of EHF in a very complex healthcare system.
John you truly inspired the students and you had that cheeky tenacity to challenge and tease the best out of students, particularly in those study sessions, when visiting PhD students and / or lecturers attended the Unit.
Dipak included these images for old times’ sake from his project report: REVIEW OF LITERATURE ON COOLING GARMENTS (NB Dipak is not wearing the vests…..)
Project Title: Envisaging Mobile Music Data Services for Students Using Participatory Capture Techniques
Pre-MSc Background: Degree in Pre-School Education, BSc in Social with Clinical Psychology, Degree in Music and Piano Diploma
Pre-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics: I really did not know what this was…I only thought the name sounded interesting…
Post-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics: The nature of a truly interdisciplinary field was revealed to me. I realised the importance of a holistic approach to applications’ and systems’ design. The term Cognitive Ergonomics directly targeted the body and mind dichotomy problem, implying that there cannot be a distinction between the two. During the MSc year, it was shown to us how psychology, biology and anatomy, engineering and computing could be combined in order to provide viable solutions to problems, extending our views on collaboration and breaking the barriers of the different fields.
Subsequent-to-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics: 14 years later, I still view the field as a source of inspiration for my personal development and research. Over the years, I realised that the field does not only combine psychology, biology, engineering and computing, but there is room for many others like sociology or art. In this light, HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics can incorporate almost all fields, depending on the individual interests and the problem requirements. For example, art can be used for providing input in a system or it could be the output of the interaction with the computer. In addition, the developments in social media, made sociology, anthropology and communication also directly relevant to the field.
Additional Reflections: I have very fond memories from my time at UCL. It was a unique experience, not only because I got the opportunity to study under a very different educational system than the one I came from (Greek) but also because I met some very interesting and inspiring people. The intensity of the course and the long hours led to the formation of strong friendships and created a group of people that know how to work with each other and trust each others skills. Even to date, I keep in touch with most of my classmates and professors, who have helped me since then with my research.
Over the last years, I am trying to explore the area of Human-Computer Non-Interaction (interaction in this sense is subtle and indirect). Although this might sound strange and contradicting, there have been attempts towards this direction like the notions of the disappearing computer: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (www.smart-future.net/10.html ). During my studies at UCL, interaction was profound and certain engineering solutions had to be applied in order to maximise usability. I am now concerned with a different engineering approach that will target the absence of interaction (or to be precise, the absence of the user’s conscious interaction with the system). The latest developments in technology and in particularly in augmented reality, now allow us to explore this area further. Still cooperating with UCL (Computing Department) and UCL Grant Museum of Zoology, we have now developed a system called Micro-augmentations that augments the physical environment of a museum and responds to the visitor’s movement without her intention. Also incorporating elements of affective computing, we are now studying users’ behaviour in systems they cannot directly control (sometimes the users do not even realise the application’s existence). Therefore, HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics seems to expand to a realm where the very nature of interaction is now changing. Still, at these early stages of our research, it remains to be seen how the different emerging problems can be solved…
1986-87 Leon Strakerhttps://www.hci-site-experiments.co.uk/wp-content/themes/engic/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg150150JohnJohnhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d46e5c6154304cf75a0c2d0059f249ab2204a9e4e458b1e88aaaa9e322763c85?s=96&d=mm&r=g
Director of Research at Curtin University of Technology
Background
Summary
Leon is Professor in the School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science at Curtin University, Associate Director of the Raine Study and a National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia Senior Research Fellow. Leon’s work focusses on the health impacts of the interactions people have with technology, especially the impact on musculoskeletal problems like back and neck pain and the impact on how sedentary or active are people.
Leon’s research, clinical experience and consultancy has focussed on children and working adults. In children he is a world authority on the physical impact of computer use by children and has more recently been investigating the impact of electronic game play on children. In adults his focus has been on office workers and on manual handling.
His research spans from laboratory based electromyographic, kinematic and kinetic biomechanical and energy expenditure physiological studies, through field based intervention trials to longitudinal epidemiological studies.
Recent projects include: a universal program for pre-school children to improve motor skills and social skills (Animal Fun), a randomised and controlled trial of active video games for children with developmental coordination disorder (EGS3), a community-based, family-centred, multidisciplinary intervention for obese teenagers (CAFAP), a randomised and controlled trial to reduce sedentariness in office workers, a longitudinal study of spinal pain trajectories from adolescence to adulthood (Raine Study) and a longitudinal study of factors predicting activity profiles in young adults, a characterisation of highly productive young adults, and the impact of multimorbidity on activity profiles in ‘baby boomers’.
Project Title: An Exploration of Compatibility Problems Found in Everyday Situations
Pre-MSc Background: BA Psychology, University of Wales
Pre-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
I first came across Ergonomics when I took a third year option in my undergraduate degree at Swansea University. We were introduced to the notion of man-machine interfaces and the importance of understanding people (from a cognitive, organisational and social perspective) when evaluating how effective technologies were for work settings. I became fascinated from then on with understanding how people and computers could work together in new and symbiotic ways.
My early experience of computers occurred whilst there were big changes afoot; first, I started learning to program using a mainframe and punch cards, then started using a workstation for doing stats tests; and then spending hours on a BBC microcomputer running psychology experiments but also playing lots of video games. HCI was just emerging as a field and I had no idea what it was. But my journey moving from a non-interactive machine to a highly enjoyable user experience set me up for understanding what makes for a bad and good interface. That has stayed with me ever since.
My third year undergraduate project was concerned with measuring different forms of information processing for cognitive and motor tasks when under the influence of alcohol and caffeine. It involved asking a number of students to drink a large amount of vodka and orange early in the morning followed by a cup of strong coffee to see how their interaction affected their motor and cognitive performance. The findings from this study were surprising; dispelling the myth that coffee sobers you up. Instead I found it made reaction time worse. Even more surprising, was receiving the Undergraduate Award for best dissertation at the Ergonomics Conference in the following year. This recognition spurred me on to greater things; wanting to know more about how human performance is affected by context.
In sum, I really didn’t have much of an idea for what I had signed up for when embarking on the Masters Course in Ergonomics at UCL. But instinctively I knew it was right for me.
Post-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics:
The Ergonomics MSc at UCL opened my eyes to the value of studying many different subjects rather than only delving deeply into one. Every day, we traipsed to a different London college to study the various contributions to Ergonomics; for example, studying lighting at the Bartlett, physiology at Chelsea College, biomechanics at the Royal Free and Cognitive Psychology at Birkbeck College. Being exposed to so many different areas and cultures (‘old school’ Birkbeck was quite different from ‘new medical school’ Royal Free) could be overwhelming at times. But it paved the way for new insights, instilling in me why and how multidisciplinarity is central to HCI and Ergonomics when trying to frame questions and generate new ideas in the context of understanding the relationship between people and technology. I was also able to study a few subjects in more depth, such as cognitive psychology and organizational psychology. This enabled me to explore more theory, learn how to model users and conduct experiments to investigate the usability of user interfaces.
What has stuck with me most from my time on the Masters degree are my fond memories of the many visits we went on as part of the course to industrial places, such as Wall’s factory (where they make sausages), a now extinct coalmine in the Midlands and a control centre in the London Underground. We learnt so much more about real people, work and machinery than you could ever put across in a lecture.
Subsequent-to-MSc View of HCI/Cognitive Ergonomics
After obtaining my Masters degree I became increasingly interested in technology, interfaces and interaction design. I knew I wanted to continue studying after completing the course. I got a job as a research demonstrator and begun my PhD in earnest, investigating the cognitive, semiotic and aesthetic properties of graphical representations, with a particular focus on iconic interfaces. It was exciting to be at the start of a new zeitgeist. I was inspired to think about future interfaces – having battled for so long with command-based interfaces. The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) came into its fore and I became part of that movement, exploring how to augment and extend a diversity of human experiences with new technologies. While I continued to have an interest in Ergonomics, for me, the action and excitement was now in HCI.
Additional Reflections
In September 2011, I took up the directorship of UCLIC, following in Professor Ann Blandford’s footsteps. She had done an excellent job during the previous 6 years overseeing the HCI and Ergonomics Master’s course, keeping it up-to-date, while expanding it to match the changes taking place in the field. UCLIC has grown and changed considerably since when I remember it as the old Ergonomics Unit back in the 80s. In the beginning there were about 15 students each year on the course. Now, there are between 30-50 students per year from all over the world. I am always amazed at the backgrounds, skills and previous experiences of our students. This includes music, media, philosophy, computer science, languages, psychology and history of art. It makes for an eclectic and vibey mix.
There is a world of difference when looking back between my time on the course and the current course. For one, the student experience is very different. The course is more integrated in what and how it teaches the different strands of HCI and Ergonomics. Technology is central to everything, from the way we teach, what we teach and how the students learn. Many of the modules are more practice-based. The students have access to fantastic online learning resources. They also learn how to use a number of software tools that are industry standard so they are better equipped to go into the world of UX.
Sadly the visits are no longer – it is simply too impractical, time-consuming and expensive to organize for 50 students each year. One legacy that remains is the course being available to students who want to study it part-time. We still get a number of students who work in a diversity of industries taking this route. It is one of our strengths to be able to mix a full-time with part-time student experience, so both can benefit.
At first it felt strange to be on the other side of the fence at UCL with such strong memories of my time here before; being the professor and the director now instead of the student. But it did not take long for me to fit into my new leadership role. My vision is to continue to grow UCLIC and evolve and update the Masters course to meet the ever-changing needs of industry and academia. Right now we are in the middle of revising the whole course. We have lots of discussions about how we might achieve this. As part of that process, we want to introduce more design thinking, physical computing and prototyping. It is a joy to address the many challenges and take up the opportunities that come our way while retaining the legacy, specialness and quality of the old Ergonomics Masters course.
HCI Engineering (HCI/E)
University of Portsmouth