Member Milestones

An Interview With HF/E Pioneer John W. Senders

On the occasion of his 90th birthday (February 26, 2010), HFES Bulletin Features Editor Pamela Savage-Knepshield asked human factors/ergonomics pioneer and HFES Fellow John W. Senders to share a few thoughts about his remarkable career and to give some advice to the next generation of HF/E researchers and practitioners.

What originally led you to pursue your remarkable career in human factors/ergonomics?

     There are really two answers to this question. Answer A is that it was quite by accident. I was production engineer at the National Company in 1941 and ran into a problem with the visual inspection of tuning condensers of U.S. Navy transmitting equipment. The inspectors had to look at arrays of finely divided sheets of aluminum that were the tuning condensers in front of a large illuminated screen behind the inspection table. The inspectors complained about the light, and the process was neither efficient nor reliable: Defects got passed and good stuff got rejected. I found some sheets of colored gelatin plastic sheeting and presented the inspectors with various alternative background lights and invited them to choose. One of the colored sheets produced a consistent reduction of false rejections, and the inspectors chose it as the best light. I had no idea at all of the actual spectrum presented, nor did it occur to me to look it up anywhere - there was a problem and I solved it. Later, I learned that I had been an unwitting human factors pioneer.

     Answer B is that I was living in a small town near Dayton, Ohio, in 1950 and wanted to visit the Aero-Med labs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It was just after the Korean war had started, and security was tight - only applicants for jobs could easily get in. I filled out an application for a research position, was sent up to see Walt Grether (whom I had met), and reassured him I did not want to fill the job they had and only wanted to see what the labs were like.

     Some few months later, Grether asked me if I would consider becoming the head of the Apparatus Development Section to design experimental equipment. I thought it would be interesting and accepted. The question was, how do they employ an engineer who had never taken a course in engineering? (I had only an A.B. in experimental psychology from Harvard.) A few days later, I received a notification from the U.S. Civil Service that my application had been processed and I was now qualified as a GS-9 (that was PhD level!) aviation physiological psychologist. The lab immediately took me on in that role, but for the engineering job.

     I did that for a few months and decided that the Controls Section research was not very well done, so I started doing tracking research on a new gadget I had designed. I was then asked to be head of the Controls Section as well as the Apparatus Developments Section. Then, about 10 months later, a new section on Unusual Environments (G-forces, vibration, high temperatures, and so on) was set up and I was asked to take that also. So I ran three sections until I got bored, and in 1956 became head of the Psychology Branch of the Arctic Aero-Medical Lab in Fairbanks, Alaska. In 1957, Honeywell made an offer I could not refuse, so I moved to Minneapolis to set up a human factors research group.

What do you wish you had learned, or learned in more depth, during your formal education?

     Queuing theory. It would have allowed me to leap over about 10 years of experimental fiddling with human use of sampled data.

What do you consider the most valuable lessons that you have learned across the wide breadth of your research, teaching, and applied experience?

     Observe your own motor and perceptual experience. Much can be discovered from your own experience. The use of voluntary visual occlusion to measure attentional demand grew from my own experience driving in a rain storm. Play with ideas and things. Look for appropriate mathematical models.

What progress have you seen in HF/E research and application in recent years? What trends (beneficial or not) have you noticed over time?

     The technological advances available to the experimenter have changed the way people think. I feel that the ubiquitous computer has made it almost unnecessary to think about the design of experiments. More papers are published, but I do not think that there are more good ideas.

In light of the technological advancements and their associated challenges that have occurred over the course of your career, how can the next generation of researchers and practitioners better address issues in HF/E?

     I think that there are some interesting possibilities in studying the relationships between the idiosyncratic logic of users and the equally idiosyncratic logic of the machines they use.

What advice can you give to those just starting out and considering a career in HF/E?

1. Get a good mathematics foundation for whatever program you get into.
2. Read a lot of the early papers and books. There are many unsolved problems embedded therein.
3. Consider repeating some of the classic theories and experiments to see if the results hold up in the new world of computerized everything.
4. For every thousand ideas, give a hundred talks, write ten memoranda and publish one paper. Save the trees!!

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