The study of ergonomics and its role in various design disciplines

Human factors engineering is a management science. Earlier, it had a name called ergonomics, ergonomics or human factors; this discipline has been established in China for some years, but in practical application, I feel that this science is just a "slogan", or In terms of "form", it is not perfectly reflected.

Human factors engineering is actually an important engineering technology discipline and a branch of industrial engineering in management science. It studies the interaction and reasonable combination of people, machines, and the environment; it is a discipline that makes the designed machines and environmental systems suitable for human physiological and psychological characteristics to achieve the purpose of improving efficiency, safety, health, and comfort in production. But what do you say about everything that involves the spiritual level in China? I think it must be the inertia of the 1960s and 1970s when the Four Old Times were broken. Many people would think this is pure nonsense and idle.

When I graduated from college, I had a very good friend who did his thesis on human factors engineering research. His tutor was a Ph.D. from the University of Berkeley in the United States, and he used to teach us "Reactor Analysis". European and American countries started studying the relationship between humans, machines, and the environment earlier than we did. After he explained his point of view, many local professors here (at that time, we called professors who had not studied abroad, Well, it's a bit like the difference between "potatoes" and "potatoes." ) all raised their own questions: In our era, was it very exciting to work on a hard bench? Now that we sit on a leather sofa, we doze off at work and feel out of mood at work... In this case, why do we still go out of our way to demand these material comforts? ——A very simple materialist thought!

Really, because of its particularity, human factors engineering focuses on the study of people’s mental cognition of the environment and the physical impact of the environment on people. It is a rather marginalized field. Discipline, its development breaks the boundaries between the disciplines we are familiar with, and integrates relevant theories of each discipline. Its comprehensiveness is self-evident, which leads to the diversification of the naming of this discipline, and the definition of the discipline itself. It is not unified, and the boundaries are blurred; but it is undeniable that the application scope of this discipline is quite wide, and some of its viewpoints must be paid attention to by those who do engineering, especially managers!

The research content of human factors engineering mainly includes human behavior, work ability, operating restrictions, such as lighting, noise, microclimate and other environmental factors, and the impact of applicable equipment on human physiology, psychology and operations. efficiency impact.

In this way, many students who often work on-site may understand: for example, near the boiler factory, the impact of noise can sometimes make people feel violent and hurtful! There is a pipe blowing process before the power plant operates. Students who have experienced it will definitely be impressed. The piercing scream can make people upset. I remember one time, after the power plant blew the pipes, the hens of nearby farmers stopped laying eggs. A large group of people were organized to block the door of the power plant to prevent workers from entering the factory to work. At that time, many people climbed over the wall. Many people who entered had their butts kicked by the farmers who were watching. You may ask, how could these jokes affect the construction of the project? There may not be any direct impact, but after something like this happens, the workers' psychology may not be normal, right? At work, we joke with each other that so-and-so got kicked in the butt when he walked in the door in the morning, or that so-and-so fell down when climbing over the wall... In such an environment, project quality and industrial safety are not necessary. Guaranteed! As a result, the project construction will be greatly affected, and this kind of impact should be potential. It has an unknown triggering condition. Once this potential becomes a reality, what a disaster it will cause. This is impossible to assess!

When I was at the Heyuan site, I heard that when those German guys were providing technical guidance, as long as they knew that soft ladders were used for on-site operations, they would not go up even if they died. Why? This is actually a matter of conservation of momentum, because when a person climbs a ladder, the force exerted by his hands and feet on the ladder is not entirely in the vertical direction, and even if the component force in the horizontal direction is very small, after climbing a section of the rope ladder , the rope will swing quite violently! When adding flue anti-corrosion work, because some resin volatiles are toxic, after putting on the pig mouth mask, you will feel stuffy after a while, and then you will feel a sense of fatigue.

According to German industrial standards, the use of rope ladders is strictly prohibited! But in China, if you "turn off the engine" while crawling, many workers will say that this guy is "empty"; Chinese culture is profound and profound, and after hearing such comments, most male compatriots will continue to work for the sake of face. This is actually a hidden danger and a potential risk. However, at the Chinese site, I have not heard of any signs of incorporating these details into detailed management.

One more question: In hospitals, especially in the operating rooms of emergency departments, doctors and nurses all wear light green clothes. Many people have asked, aren’t nurses said to be angels in white? Why do you wear green clothes during the surgery? I searched many times on Baidu and found that many friends take it for granted that green represents life and symbolizes the recovery of all things. How should I say this? This answer can be regarded as correct, but it does not hit the point. In fact, it also implies a principle of human factors engineering: during surgery, the doctor's eyes always stay on the bright red blood. After a long time, , the optic nerve will self-adjust due to fatigue, using a complementary color to fill this parallax. If the doctor turns back at this time, or occasionally shifts his gaze to the white coat of his companion, he will see spots of "green blood", which will cause visual confusion and affect the operation; therefore, doctors and nurses in the operating room should wear light-colored clothes. The fundamental reason for the green coat is to reduce visual fatigue, thereby ensuring that the surgery can be performed better.

Human factors are indeed a crucial factor that can affect project construction! Accidents caused by human factors are also common in engineering construction. For example, using the PSA program, we can calculate that the probability of a core meltdown accident in a nuclear power plant is one in 10 million per reactor per year, and the probability of a radioactive leakage is higher than that of the reactor core. The melting is an order of magnitude smaller! Take Shandong Nuclear Power's AP1000 as an example. Theoretically, the probability of a core meltdown accident is one in 5.88 million [1.7×10^(-7)/reactor year], and the probability of radioactive leakage is 5,550. One hundred and fifty thousandth [1.8×10^(-8)/pile year]!

However, the accident that occurred at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania, USA, on March 28, 1979, accounted for both core meltdown and radioactive leakage; from December 2, 1942, the world The first reactor was ignited on March 28, 1979, only 37 years ago! If calculated from the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant itself, its core meltdown probability will be greater than this data: >1/37! This is so different from the one in ten million or one in one hundred million that we theoretically get. Why is this? Many people say that theory, after all, is something in books, and it must be different from the actual situation; they also doubt the theory, and even go further to regard it as experience. This is a common situation at Chinese construction sites! But in fact, since accidents caused by human factors are an unknown quantity in probability, we don’t know who will make the mistake, when they will make the mistake, and how big the mistake will be. Therefore, the probability given by PSA is after deducting the probability of human factors. .

This also reflects the importance of human factors in engineering practice! For example, the operators of nuclear power plants are all equipped with psychologists. The main purpose of doing so is to relieve the psychological pressure of personnel working in important positions; however, often in this regard, Chinese people have a prejudice: that Seeing a psychiatrist is a symbol of mental illness, and we sometimes curse and call others crazy (mental illness); therefore, there are also many people who work in important positions who will refuse this way of working. In other words, this should not be done, or should be corrected in the mainstream consciousness of the country. Just like many female students are reluctant to enter gynecological hospitals: in China, gynecology and female medicine are merged together, and going to the gynecology department for treatment sometimes puts some psychological pressure on female students.

Human factors engineering has a wide range of research objects and great uses. To do a good job in a project, especially the nuclear-related field we are about to enter, our managers must have a certain degree of research on this subject. .

For example, many of our procurement professionals generally believe that domestic products are inferior to imported ones for the same product, so when it comes to matching equipment, most people will choose imported products.

But there is one thing. Foreign designers design according to the common requirements of their own people: a very simple example, if you buy an electrical appliance in Japan, it may not work in China because the household voltage in Japan is 110V. The frequency is 60Hz, which is different from China. For another example, Russian equipment is very durable, but the average height of Russians is higher than that of Chinese people, so the operating stations of some equipment and instruments are relatively high. When brought to China, we can't even operate it! ——This is ergonomics from the perspective of design: Our design must meet the requirements of on-site workers. These requirements may not be put forward by on-site workers, but they are common sense and easy to be ignored by designers. If you don't have such carefully crafted ideas, you will be criticized or even abused by the on-site staff.

In engineering, human factors engineering is concentrated in on-site management. Personnel must be trained. When working, try to lead the new with the old, and the superiors must be clear when assigning tasks. In fact, I think most nuclear power plants in China are not doing it properly at this point, because the workers involved in actual work generally have low academic qualifications, and when issuing orders in the nuclear power plant, they all use KKS codes or their own set of Pinyin character codes. This is not good for Workers working on site are actually a big difficulty. Someone once mistakenly cut off a working pipeline because of the wrong coding, which eventually led to an accident. If a Chinese instruction had been provided when giving instructions to the workers, using Chinese characters to repeatedly describe the specific location of the work, then the accident could have been avoided!

Once, when a senior engineer faced an inducement that might cause a serious accident, he did not issue decisive instructions to deal with it. Instead, he was afraid of taking responsibility for the accident and searched for emergency procedure documents, which delayed the prevention of the situation. The precious opportunity for expansion resulted in huge losses to the power station. From a procedural point of view, this senior engineer did not make any mistakes, but what should I say? At that time, many employees in their unit privately said that this senior engineer was not capable. When doing engineering, disasters caused by human factors are inevitable. The best we can do is to avoid them as much as possible! We should not be afraid of making mistakes at work. As the saying goes: small mistakes will continue but big mistakes will never happen! Only when we have accumulated the necessary experience in dealing with accidents can we be calm when facing things. Making mistakes is not terrible, and the terrible thing is not not being unrepentant, but panicking and being at a loss when facing mistakes.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed this: usually at a construction site, most of the construction workers on site come from the same place, and there are rarely mixed teams from the north and the south. In fact, for fellow villagers, their accents, daily habits, gestures, etc. are all similar. It is said in the "Three Character Classic" that in the beginning, people are inherently good by nature, similar in nature, and far apart in habits. If workers from all over the world are mixed together to work, not to mention the conflicts that may arise due to customs, errors will occur when speaking, transmitting messages and instructions. I once met people from Hangzhou Shunhao Rubber Engineering Co., Ltd. at a construction site in Heyuan, and I was "honored" to work with their workers. How can I say that there is no medial tone when people in Hangzhou speak? For example, "the police caught the thief", they would read it as "the police caught the thief"; I remember one time when a man from Hangzhou asked me to help him brush glue onto the rubber skin. This is what he said: "Xiao Wang, you put that rubber It's 'killed'!" I was so stupid that I turned around and started looking for a knife. Because I started to see him cutting rubber with a utility knife. It was quite strange. He could have said "cut", so why did he say "kill"? When he saw me looking for a knife, he sighed and said, "Oh, you young people don't know anything!" Then he took out a brush and started painting the plastic board. While brushing, he taught me: "See? You want it?" So 'killing'!"; Another time he asked me to move short pipes, which are short rubber-lined pipes on the construction site, no longer than 50 centimeters. He said, "Xiao Wang, go and move those bile ducts." I am also very confused. I have been at the construction site for more than a year and I have never heard of the term "bile duct"? I didn't know until later that he moved a few pipes by himself. Fortunately, the two incidents reminded me that Hangzhou Mandarin does not have medial sounds. Otherwise, I almost misunderstood the rubber-lined pipes of about 50 cm. Thinking of it as a "bile duct", I bent my body and memorized the shape of the "bile duct" for a long time.

With the development of human factors engineering, the content it contains has included the microclimate environment (that is, the relationship between human comfort and microclimate, the impact of high and low temperature operating environments on people, the microclimate environment Standards and improvements), lighting environment, noise environment, color environment, air environment, sensation (psychophysics, sensory physiology, vision, hearing, other senses), perception, attention and memory (cognitive psychology), human information processing Multidisciplinary integration including system (reaction time and movement time), physical labor load and work fatigue, anthropometry, work space design, human-machine system design, human-machine interface design, etc.

So, human factors engineering is a discipline that we have to pay attention to from engineering design, engineering construction to project operation!