National Ergonomics Month has officially begun. I’d like to celebrate the month with a few more posts about human factors issues, but for now I’ll just include this little plug to advertise. After all, that’s what NEM is all about.

According to the website, NEM serves to promote human factors to the public “by providing information and services.” As part of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society at school, it seems like a lot of what HFES groups do is try to raise awareness about the field as a whole.

It’s a tough road. Most people I encounter have never heard of human factors or engineering psychology. I’ve even been on a few interviews for human factors positions where the prospective employer needed me to explain what my major was. Most people know they need someone to do the job but they don’t know there’s a field that exists just for the purpose of designing to meet humans’ needs.

I do wish there was more to be done during National Ergonomics Month than just self-promotion. Necessary as it is, I wish we could provide more services and let our actions do the advertising. Unfortunately, this doesn’t come easy. Many human factors issues are not a quick fix, but require long-term maintenance — perhaps the issue was even caused by a lack of continuous maintenance, like many of the broken links on old Tufts webpages.

Even the NEM and HFES websites do not provide many ideas in the way of services to provide. Many schools host “Bad Design” contests, and while these can be fun, they most likely point out flaws in something that would be costly to fix. It makes it seem like human factors is about critiquing design, not about fixing it. So while a “Bad Design” contest may make for an entertaining photo, it would be more worthwhile to point out human factors issues that can be easily fixed, like poorly placed signs, confusing directions, or the sections of a school website.

With that in mind, my goal for NEM is to find a few “bad designs” around campus and not only explain how I would fix them, but see what I can do about making it happen.