EURISCO International, in volontary liquidation
Activities
Eurisco's research and industrial activities are immersed into cognitive engineering:
- The goal of engineering is to design and manufacture machines
- The goal of cognitive engineering is to understand the use of machines
An artifact is a physical or conceptual human-designed entity useful for a given class of users to perform specific tasks. It is sometimes very difficult to know if the task defines the artifact or if the artifact defines the task. In reality, users profiles, tasks and artifacts are incrementally defined to satisfy a specific objective. For example, we may want to design a new airplane to carry 1000 passengers. That is the main objective. The task that will need to perform the operators involved in the operations of such an aircraft will be broken into a flying task, passenger management task, a commercial task and a maintenance task for instance. The classical engineering tradition is centered on the construction of the artifact, e.g., a 1000-seats aircraft. The task and the user are usually taken into account implicitly. Task can be modeled from a task analysis or a model of the process that the artifact will help to perform. A specified task leads to a set of information requirements for the artifact. Conversely, the artifact sends back its own technological limitations according to the current availability of technology. Users can be incrementally taken into account in the design loop either through the development of syntaxo-semantic user models or through the adaptation of analogous user models. User modeling can be implicit or explicit, and leads to the definition of appropriate user profiles. When a version of the artifact and the task are available, the user can use the artifact to perform the task. An analysis of the user activity is then possible, which contributes to modify both the task and the artifact. The use of the artifact provides data to adapt both the artifact to the user (ergonomics), and the user to the artifact (procedures and training). The user-task-artifact triangle is depicted in Figure 1. It implicitly defines an incremental approach to design.
The conceptual model of the use of an artifact and the artifact itself evolve incrementally. The effect of and the influence on the organizational environment are often not taken into account in conventional design. This was one of the reasons why the AUTO pyramid framework was proposed the concurrent investigation of Artifacts, Users, Tasks and Organizational environments, to develop more situated conceptual models (Figure 1). Environment introduces three additional issues:
- the designed artifact emerges in the environment, and the environment evolves from the integration of the artifact;
- the task requires the organization of new jobs, and the environment sends back new roles;
- users using the artifact to perform the task in the environment determine social issues.
[Figure 1]
When a human has to control a safety-critical machine, such as an aircraft, he or she must adapt. This adaptation is performed due to a severe selection, long training and frequent skill updating. Automatisms have been developed to reduce some of the difficulties due to the complexity of the task . These automatisms have often created new adaptation problems. If automation has contributed to decrease the level of stress in normal situations, it has also contributed to decrease the level of vigilance, and disturbed some human operators in abnormal situations.
One of the main goals in human-machine interaction is to maintain system performance within a safety envelope by avoiding that critical functions get used outside of safety limits. To make sure that he or she correctly controls the machine, the human operator needs to be aware of the current situation (situation awareness), and to know what appropriate actions to choose at the right time. Instruments should provide the right information, in the right format and in the right context, to make sure that he or she can transform it for his or her own needs, combine them, and consequently perform the right actions.
It is clear that humans are able to adapt to a variety of situations. In other words, some machines can be used despite their design, instead of because of their design. However, ergonomics principles suggest that it is much better to adapt the machine to the human than the other way around. How is this kind of adaptation possible? There are three levels of adaptation that define a global ergonomics paradigm (Figure 2):
- local adaptation that concerns the human-machine interface itself and operation procedures that guide the interaction; this type of adaptation corresponds to local ergonomics;
- organizational coordination that concerns the management, the definition of the roles and jobs that emerge from the integration of a new artifact in an organization;
- organizational memory management and human-centered design that concerns experience feedback and use by design teams.
[Figure 2]
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