Several years ago a good friend who knows my interest in human factors and engineering psychology gave me a book called Set Phasers on Stun and Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error, by Steven Casey. I started to read it again recently and wanted to share it with you because the book demonstrates, according to the message on the jacket, “how technological failures result from the incompatibilities between the way things are designed and the way people actually perceive, think, and act. New technologies will succeed or fail based on our ability to minimize these incompatibilities between the characteristics of people and the characteristics of the things we think and use.” In the book Casey relates quite a few real-life stories about the interactions of people with modern technology and discusses the what caused the resulting human error. So if you need some new reading material, I encourage you to pick up a copy – I think you’ll find it fascinating!
- KB