http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/05/20/hand-grasp-and-finder-grip/ mind/tech bazar from outer space Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:00:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=wordpress-mu-1.2.1 http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/05/20/hand-grasp-and-finder-grip/#comment-480356 Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Design Engineering People Thu, 22 May 2008 04:59:20 +0000 http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/05/20/hand-grasp-and-finder-grip/#comment-480356 [...] Nicolas’ post the other day got me thinking. After my first job as an engineer, I wanted to find ways to do work that had more direct implications for people. I found things like Human Factors, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Human Interaction. They had the word “human” in them, so I figured this was the engineering way to involve itself in more directly people-focused things. A year of work in the Industrial Engineering department and the Human Computer Interface Lab (HITLab) at the University of Washington and I mostly found that this meant things that were closer to the images above. A rather instrumented, statistics-based, operational model of “humans” (not people) to shape and inform engineering work. Grips. Airline seats. Load bearing capabilities. Key-press force limits. That kind of thing. This wasn’t the kind of thing I imagined, but it was a useful experience, to understand the ways in which various engineering disciplines develop a vocabulary and set of practices that involve social actors, like “humans” or “people.” [...] […] Nicolas’ post the other day got me thinking. After my first job as an engineer, I wanted to find ways to do work that had more direct implications for people. I found things like Human Factors, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Human Interaction. They had the word “human” in them, so I figured this was the engineering way to involve itself in more directly people-focused things. A year of work in the Industrial Engineering department and the Human Computer Interface Lab (HITLab) at the University of Washington and I mostly found that this meant things that were closer to the images above. A rather instrumented, statistics-based, operational model of “humans” (not people) to shape and inform engineering work. Grips. Airline seats. Load bearing capabilities. Key-press force limits. That kind of thing. This wasn’t the kind of thing I imagined, but it was a useful experience, to understand the ways in which various engineering disciplines develop a vocabulary and set of practices that involve social actors, like “humans” or “people.” […]

]]> http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/05/20/hand-grasp-and-finder-grip/#comment-479980 JUlian Bleecker Wed, 21 May 2008 05:09:38 +0000 http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/05/20/hand-grasp-and-finder-grip/#comment-479980 What I enjoy most about these diagrams are the way they assert "people" through a operational, instrumental rendering. It's the one of only a few, equally bland ways in which engineering and the sciences, generally, have to "talk" about people and their practices. Ergonomics, human-factors, medicine — everything, really, needs a language to describe the people-practices to which these disciplines collide. This is a perfect example of an attempt to describe and represent "human form," while avoiding complications of "people." What I enjoy most about these diagrams are the way they assert “people” through a operational, instrumental rendering. It’s the one of only a few, equally bland ways in which engineering and the sciences, generally, have to “talk” about people and their practices. Ergonomics, human-factors, medicine — everything, really, needs a language to describe the people-practices to which these disciplines collide. This is a perfect example of an attempt to describe and represent “human form,” while avoiding complications of “people.”

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