Human Factors for Resilience and Sustainability

The field of Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) has traditionally focused on studying how people interact with tools and tasks and designing systems that improve usability, performance, and reliability. As currently practiced, HFE is narrowly focused on short-term business goals, product usability, and user performance while ignoring environmental and societal externalities such as resource depletion, waste, and negative effects on education, health, or labor (e.g., planned obsolescence or optimizing for sales rather than longevity or reuse). Some theorists and practitioners (e.g., Monteiro, Norman, Thatcher) have called for transforming HFE toward a more ethically responsible and inclusive discipline. The field of Mathematical and Computational Psychology (MCP) has traditionally developed formal models of how the human mind works. Some of these models have been used to inform HFE theories and practices. In turn, HFE has been used to validate MCP models. The two areas have complemented each other and co-evolved. However, they might have also constrained each other. For example, since MCP models tend to favor parsimony, experimental control, and domain-independent formalisms, they might have inadvertently contributed to the myopic focus of HFE applications. Conversely, the HFE’s neglect of societal and ethical factors might have deprived MCP of opportunities to expand its scope. Moving forward, there is potential for both MCP and HFE to synergistically expand their scope and contribute to the goals of resilience and sustainability for all of humanity, through, e.g., modeling adaptive capacity and resilience in dynamic and complex systems, designing for long-term horizons, energy efficiency, and ecosystem integrity.