Abstract
This year is the 150th anniversary (or sesquicentennial, as the British press report) of the first underground railway in the world. Commonly referred to as “The Tube,” the London Underground developed with tunnels that twist and turn as they followed the curves of London’s medieval street plan. How serendipitous that we have a lead article about the development of the iconic map of this fascinating public transit system. Asaf Degani not only provides an interesting historical account of the evolution of the map but also uses the diagrams to discuss the problem of information organization and diagrammatic design. He concludes with several principles for an algorithmic approach to diagram generation. This information has great value today, with the complexity of human interaction and technology that can be represented as networks.
Most of us in the United States drive cars with automatic transmissions. If you learned how to drive in a car with a manual transmission, would years of driving an automatic help you forget the skills you knew? Would our skills be downgraded? Retention of basic manual flying skill among airline pilots is a growing concern of some accident investigators as flight decks grow more automated. In Part 1 of a two-part article, Eric Geiselman, Christopher Johnson, and David Buck discuss the issue of whether or not airline pilots are losing their ability to fly aircraft. The authors do not advocate more automation but suggest greater subtlety in design by providing more context-aware automation. Part II, entitled “Flight Deck Automation: A Call for Context-Aware Logic to Improve Safety,” will appear in a future issue of Ergonomics in Design and proposes interface designs that provide context to mitigate overreliance on automation. We would be delighted if these articles provoke a conversation, either in EID or The Blog. Let us hear from you!
If you learned how to drive in a car with a manual transmission, would years of driving an automatic help you to forget the skills you knew?
Our technology article may be of interest to many EID readers. Researchers and practitioners use simultaneous video recording in labs for analyzing simulations and also in the field. These days, funding − especially for research − is hard to come by, but Timothy Coles and Cedric Dumas share a low-cost method of using multiple synchronized video cameras for task analysis. Their method evolved from several projects and resulted in a flexible and lightweight system. If this sounds highly technical, turn to the article, because Coles and Dumas assure us that the equipment can be purchased and set up by novice computer users.
I know I have had a near-miss while driving. It was the one time I did not look over my shoulder past the blind spot. A car seemed to appear out of nowhere right next to me. But how bad was that near miss? Which near misses should we focus on to make a difference in driver safety? Now that there is new technology to measure and store vehicle proximity, Thomas Sheridan shares his novel approach of using event reenactment to develop a safety measure corresponding to the probability of collision. The probability of collision depends on estimating the variability of closest proximity between vehicles. Sheridan bolsters his method with examples of various vehicle scenarios, such as passing or stopping, and suggests ways in which the metric can be used to enhance driver safety.
In the Research Digest, Arathi Sethumadhavan discusses design guidelines for patient safety. She draws attention to four diverse and interesting articles in the journal Human Factors and the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 2012 Annual Meeting. By her choice of articles, Arathi reminds us of the breadth of issues that are tackled by human factors/ergonomics professionals.
