Ironies of Automation (1983)

This paragraph made me think of the masses of office drones who are performing repetitive tasks using poorly designed software on inadequate machines:

Ekkers and colleagues (19791) have published a preliminary study of the correlations between control system characteristics and the operators' subjective health and feeling of achievement. To greatly simplify : high coherence of process information, high process complexity and high process controllability (whether manual or by adequate automatics) were all associated with low levels of stress and workload and good health. and the inverse, while fast process dynamics and a high frequency of actions which cannot be made directly on the interface were associated with high stress and workload and poor health. High process controllability, good interface ergonomics and a rich pattern of activities were all associated with high feeling of achievement. Many studies show that high levels of stress lead to errors, while poor health and low job satisfaction lead to the high indirect costs of absenteeism, etc. (e.g. Mobley and colleagues, 1979).

- incoherent information: PC LOAD LETTER

- low complexity: Email/Calendar/Address Book, a 12 year old could do it on pencil and paper

- low controllability: "Hold on a minute, I'm just waiting for the computer," says ever receptionist everywhere

- poor ergonomics: sitting in a cubicle using software written by the lowest cost bidder

- simple pattern of activites: click, click, click, click, click, click, click

EDIT:

Thus, they do jobs that are seen as easy (low status), with minimal training and an environment that is hostile to wellness, attentivity, and focus, and totally outside their control. An environment which directly interferes with their principal purpose of interacting with people, understanding people, and using their judgement to help people or the company.

Add to that the common flaw of push-based throughput oriented high-utilization management, instead of pull-based availability oriented high-output management .... welcome to the psychic prison.

It's hard to read about this and not think about Air France Flight 447.

Relevant:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/aerospace/aviation/air-f...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-dea...

The auto/manual difference seems related to: "debugging is twice as hard as coding" and argues for a self-driving car model that is fully automatic, and would pull over and stop if it cannot cope, rather than an assisted/monitored model that is mostly automatic, except when problems suddenly arise, when it might toss the intractable issue (and control of a moving vehicle) to a previously more competent driver. ("Hey, human, it's suddenly snowing, and I'm losing traction, take the wheel, now!")

... and this article is apparently less important to HN-ers :D

anyway, this adds more to my belief that our current / future IT 'issues' are actually have been solved / solvable by the past. It's just that the past are buried somewhere, either in paper / old machine / brain

I'd love to chat with the author of this paper.

This is pure gold, I love the analytical thinking in it, especially as someone designing systems that commonly interface computers with human operators.

I've saved it, it's a great checklist of unintended effects of design decisions I can go through while working on my projects.