Human Factors Engineering is about improving the match between people and the technology and environment around them so that both well-being and performance are improved. Safety and comfort are often presented in the context of a trade-off and requirement to sacrifice something on the economic end, but justified by a moral imperative to Do Good (or Do Right).
We often look at the inclusion of people as something to be tolerated and a “weak link” and it is true that sometimes in the daily duel with technology, people are bested by insurmountable tricks and traps. Of course, we don’t think of them as tricks and traps. We think “if only we did not have such stupid users,” (hat tip to Jakob Nielsen) “and the users would use technology properly, then things would work just fine.” In fact, as much as a human might drop a ball that a robot wouldn’t, a human will stretch and push their limits to reach for a ball where a robot would simply say, “Cannot reach ball. Abort.”
It can be difficult to change our perspective and, say, design for the users we have rather than the users we wish we had. We get comfortable designing a certain way and blaming “stupid users” when they fail to succeed at their tasks. That explanation not only avoids changing our design, but gives us smug satisfaction that we’re smarter than our users. The momentum is against doing things a different way. A new library of video materials that can be used in class? Are they closed captioned? Of course not. Putting on captions is a trivial technical challenge. But if it isn’t something we aren’t doing now, then we will think of it as an add-on. The cheesy musical soundtrack in a lot of educational videos, meanwhile, is not considered an add-on at all, even though it contributes nothing of any educational value at all. The cost of captions could probably be covered by savings no longer licensing the cheesy music, but I think I am about to get off point.
The point is, we often think of things the way they have always been, not as they could be or sometimes should be (or really, really should be). Good human factors takes a step back from the status quo and does not just focus on the specific problem and making its consequences go away, but rather looks at the system as a whole, from its goals and objectives down to the allocation of functions to people and technology in order to bring those goals to fruition. One vital reason for this is that the little tweaks we may be tricked into making to eradicate a specific and seemingly self-contained problem can have ripple effects across the system: unintended consequences. Another reason for this is that the big picture perspective can give us more options for solutions. If we say “anything is possible: bring it on”, then we can put all our resources on the table and combine them in new ways. We are not aboard Apollo 13 with a limited amount of duct tape and rubber tubing. We have many resources and options and free will to combine them in new ways as well as old.
The example I want to make today is about equity in the Academy and applying the above human-factors problem-solving principles. We all know that diversity in the Academy is a work in progress. Few groups are as under-represented as deaf people. While we are 4% of the population in Canada, with let’s say 1/4 of those being sign-language-using Deaf people and the rest being people with severe hearing loss acquired later in life. Yet there are just 4 Deaf sign-language users among Canada’s approximately 30,000 professors.
This proportion is rather like Guildenstern’s assertion in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard, 1966) about 157 consecutive coin flips landing on “heads” as “a spectacular indication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails, and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does.” Is the preponderance of non-Deaf faculty just a spectacular indication that faculty hires are just as likely to come down on the 99% proportion when they do so 100% of the time with just four exceptions?
One way of looking at this is that this isn’t a problem at all, that Deafness and Academia are fundamentally incompatible. Let’s not go there.
If we approach this problem at the micro-problem level, we provide Deaf students with sign language interpreters in the classroom and send them off to the Access department as “special needs” outsiders from our Academic dialogues. The unintended consequence of this is that they become clinical patients of an academic treatment rather than junior colleagues on the continuum of scholarship. While this may solve the local problem of relieving the stress within the single classroom, where initially felt, the unintended consequences come to bear down the line in the form of inequity in the Academy. Where are the PhD graduates? And without Deaf professors, even if Deaf students expect to “succeed” and graduate, they almost certainly expect to go far, far away as they don’t see themselves on the other side of the classroom. This is further compounded by perceptions of professors themselves: if the only Deaf contact they have had have been with “patients”, the recipients of “special needs” services, they may consider a Deaf candidate for an academic position a can of worms best not opened.
The big-picture perspective (anything is possible: bring it on) enables us to appreciate that we can see a classroom as other than a speaking message-sender and a listening message-receiver. We regard people as being capable of committing to communicating in any way necessary to make it happen, and in acting on that commitment. The professors on a faculty hiring committee would look at the Deaf candidate and say “he must have some incredible resilience to get to where he is given what goes on in other places. Let’s see what he can do here among people who are committed to equity.” When we do that, marvellous things can happen. Not just Deaf students graduating, but hearing students learning that Deaf students are their peers and potentially in the future as legitimate job candidates, and indeed potentially their bosses, doctors, and professors. And when things go spectacularly well, we end up with a Deaf person whose scholarship is recognized at one of the highest levels of excellence: MacArthur Fellow.
October 20, 2011 was a red-letter day for Ryerson University hosting MacArthur Fellow Dr. Carol Padden to describe how that happened for her, as well as to share with a public audience her current research in language, gesture, and culture. Many of the several hundred members of the Deaf community travelled for hours to join the Ryerson community at this outstanding evening event.
