Can good design help seafarers make better decisions?

摘要

Mariners will generally find a way to make a system work, albeit not necessarily as the designers intended. Often that leads to discomfort, distraction and even injury. Moreover, as ships grow more complicated, with reduced manning and growing dependency upon the human-machine interface, this problem is only likely to be exacerbated. But what can naval architects and ship designers do to help mitigate this? "One of the problems of ergonomics is that although the concept is very simple - to make the user the centre of the design - the details for what this means for a particular arrangement of equipment, the procedure for a particular job and how to address the range of people who will do that job involves lots of tradeoffs," explains Dr Jonathan Earthy, technical authority for Human Factors at Lloyds Register.