All Workshops Take Place on Monday, October 13

Full-Day Workshops Scheduled for 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Morning Half-Day Workshops Scheduled for 8:30 a.m. - Noon
Half-Day Workshops Scheduled for 1:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
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An Introduction to the Wide World of Macroergonomics
  • Dr. Hanna Barton, University of Wisconsin – Madison
  • Dr. Dan Nathan-Roberts, San Jose State University
  • Dr. Michelle Robertson, Northeastern University
  • Dr. Edmond Ramly, Indiana University
  • Amy Graske, Froedtert Health

This workshop will introduce participants to the wide world of macroergonomics. A foundational skill of any Human Factors and Ergonomics professional, as recognized by Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomics (BCPE), is understanding and applying macroergonomics principles. Participants need no prior experience with macroergonomics to attend this workshop. The workshop will cover foundational macroergonomics and sociotechnical systems models and methods, targeted case studies in applying macroergonomics to various domains, and will include a hands-on, small-group activity in applying macroergonomic approaches to the analysis and design of systems that are of interest to the participants. Participants will be mentored by a diverse team of HFE practitioners with experience applying macroergonomics in a variety of industries and settings.

Developing Confidence in Work Re-Design for Psychosocial rRisks: An Introduction to the Psychosocial Hazards Work Re-Design Tool (PHReD-T)         
  • Dr. Carlo Caponecchia, The University of New South Wales

Attention to the range of psychosocial hazards to which workers can be exposed in work systems has been growing recently. Following the results of workplace stress research over decades (See Boot, LaMontagne & Madsen, 2024), patterns of compensated injury, and social movements signaling a lack of tolerance to workplace violence, harassment and bullying (e.g., the MeToo movement), some jurisdictions have responded with increased workplace health and safety regulations (e.g., Safe Work Australia, 2022).

A new International Standard has been developed in relation to managing psychosocial risks within the framework of occupational health and safety management systems (ISO45003:2021). Evidence supports that the most effective approach to intervention is to develop initiatives that support mentally healthy work through improvements in work design (e.g., Blackwood et al, 2017; Aumayr-Pinta, Cerf, & Parent-Thirion, 2018). However, work re-design is sometimes unfamiliar to many Occupational Health and Safety and Human Resources practitioners and senior managers (Leka & Jain, 2016). This workshop focuses on a tool (PHReD-T) that was developed to assist in the development of skills and confidence on re-designing work for managing psychosocial risks. The PHReD tool leads users through a process of understanding their organizational context, before developing a work scenario that forms the basis of the re-design activity. Users practice work re-design for the scenario, including developing change logic, action plans, and a consultation plan. The tool is supported by an online resource suite that includes: background information about work re-design and psychosocial hazards; case studies showcasing examples of work re-design across a range of industries; FAQs, and a glossary.

During the workshop we will introduce the PHRED-T including how and why it was developed, its steps and unique features. Workshop participants will use elements of the PHRED-T with supplied case studies, and report back to the group on their experience, including suggested work re-design strategies, challenges, and highlights, and alignment with their own work experiences. The workshop activities will use an online whiteboard tool (MIRO), which participants can access using their own device (laptop or tablet). The workshop is ideal for safety and health professionals interested in psychosocial risks.

Scenario Development for Cognitive Skills Training: An Interactive Workshop
  • Joseph Borders, ShadowBox, LLC
  • John Schmitt, ShadowBox, LLC

Cognitive skills, also known as non-technical skills, such as pattern recognition, sensemaking, and attention management, are essential for effective decision-making in high-stakes fields like aviation, policing, and healthcare. Experiential, scenario-based training is a powerful method for developing these skills and fostering expertise, allowing operators to refine their ability to rapidly assess situations, recognize critical cues, and make decisions under pressure. Designed for both practitioners and researchers, this workshop provides a structured and hands-on approach to authoring scenario-based cognitive skills training exercises.

Participants will explore the critical but often difficult-to-teach aspects of expertise (i.e., tacit knowledge), and examine how training fidelity influences skill acquisition and transfer. They will also learn how to determine the appropriate level of training fidelity for different types of training, considering their focus and objectives, and how these choices impact learning outcomes and scenario design. The workshop will cover essential principles of scenario design, including incident selection, developing plot elements, and aligning scenarios with learning objectives and key insights. A key emphasis will be on crafting decision points and response options that elicit misconceptions and reveal flawed mental models. Additionally, we will discuss best practices for collecting, synthesizing, and integrating subject matter expert feedback into training exercises, to facilitate opportunities for trainees to correct and update their thinking.

Beyond the conceptual discussions, this workshop will include interactive activities where participants will work in small groups to design and refine their own training scenarios. Through guided exercises, attendees will create scenario outlines, decision points, response options, and incorporate expert feedback into training exercises. They will also have the opportunity to present their scenarios to the larger group and receive constructive feedback. By the end of the session, participants will have a practical framework for developing scenario-based cognitive skills training that is grounded in principles of accelerated expertise development. They will receive supplementary materials, including key references and scenario templates, to facilitate the implementation of these concepts beyond the workshop. This workshop is ideal for researchers and practitioners involved in training and development, instructional design, or workforce development in high-stakes environments where decision-making and expertise are critical.

From Chats to App: Designing AI for People
  • Prof. John Lee, University of Wisconsin – Madison
  • Vianney Renata, University of Wisconsin – Madison

This workshop addresses the human side of Generative AI (GenAI) and how GenAI applications can transform work. GenAI may be one of the most transformative technologies of the last decade, century, or even millennium. This workshop aims to explain the technology behind the hype. The aim is to help people use GenAI to enhance personal productivity and to understand the basic elements of GenAI. To understand the AI underlying these applications, we will examine the characteristics of generative large language models and their multi-modal and agent-based variants. Participants will learn about the current state of GenAI, the underlying principles of large language models, model fine-tuning, and effective prompt engineering techniques. Participants will learn the language that describes GenAI that is needed to communicate in multidisciplinary design teams. These characteristics of AI define a new design material, which introduces new ethical and human considerations.

We will address these considerations when using AI for personal productivity and when creating human-centered AI applications. We will offer human-AI interaction design principles collected from recent GenAI papers and long-standing human-automation design principles. We will also explore the safety, ethical, and economic implications of GenAI for individuals, communities, and society. The workshop has eight discussion-based modules: 1) The hype and consequences of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), 3) human-centered GenAI systems, 4) prompt engineering, 5) LLMs in spreadsheets, 6) development AI applications in R, and 7) AI workflow and agent-based AI, 8) safety, ethics, and economics of AI. Hands-on activities with AI applications and coding will augment these discussions.

Participants will learn new techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and then implement using R and LLM APIs. Workshop participants will create a conversational application using LLM APIs and RAG to interact with a set of documents of participants' choice. No prior knowledge or expertise is required, but some experience with R is helpful. Participants should bring a laptop with R and RStudio installed. Instructors will assist with setup. This workshop welcomes all interested individuals to learn, discuss, and develop GenAI applications to build their experience with this transformative technology.

Designing for Implementation: Implementation Science for Human Factors
  • Prof. Edmond Ramly, Indiana University
  • Prof. Nicole Werner, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
  • Prof. Richard Holden, Indiana University
  • Prof. Rupa Valdez, University of Virginia
  • Prof. Mustafa Ozkaynak, University of Colorado
  • Dr. Reid Parks, Indiana University

This workshop introduces the fundamentals of implementation science and their applications for human factors to augment the human-centered design of sustainable sociotechnical system interventions. This highly successful workshop, first offered at HFES/ASPIRE 2024 is returning by popular demand, building on positive participant-reported results to offer a refined version of the workshop. In pre-post participant surveys, self-assessed ability to design for implementation across 8 competencies increased from 33% (20% to 70% range) to 95% (82% to 100% range). Attendees at the 2024 workshop reflected: “Great workshop! Made me think a lot!” “It left me with a wide toolset” “Set a high bar for the rest of the conference!”

Using human factors case studies, we will introduce the three most established implementation science frameworks, and how they fit with human factors research and practice. Participants will begin with the end in mind, targeting successful implementation outcomes by applying the RE-AIM framework to understand and analyze the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation fidelity and cost, and Maintenance of an intervention of their choice. Then, participants will be able to assess implementation determinants by applying the CFIR – Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research to analyze the contextual factors that may be barriers or facilitators of success in achieving intended implementation outcomes. Finally, participants will be able to create and apply implementation processes with implementation strategies to overcome barriers and promote facilitators using by applying the ERIC – Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change framework to analyze, evaluate, and create a tailored implementation blueprint.

This workshop was developed by the Design and Implementation Sciences Program (Director, Prof. Edmond Ramly; Manager, Dr. Reid Parks), the Center for Health by Design (Co-Director, Prof. Rich Holden), and refined in collaboration with Prof. Nicole Werner, Prof. Rupa Valdez, and Prof. Mustafa Ozkaynak.

Target Audience: HF/E Students, Researchers, and Practitioners; Clinicians Welcome! Materials: Participants will benefit from bringing a laptop or tablet and an intervention for their past or upcoming work at any stage of the design lifecycle!

Methods for Promoting Insights and Discoveries
  • Dr. Gary Klein, ShadowBox LLC
  • John Schmitt, ShadowBox, LLC

Insights are critical in many professional domains. Insights enable people to identify leverage points, discover opportunities, and notice threats. However, people are given little guidance about how to foster insights. Worse, popular advice generally neglects insights entirely. At the organizational level, priority is given to avoiding mistakes even at the cost of inhibiting discoveries.

This workshop is designed to help participants put into practice the lessons we learned from a naturalistic study of insights — a very different perspective than the controlled laboratory tasks that dominate the research field to date.

The workshop will cover: The different forms of insight, the weaknesses of standard advice, four general tactics for gaining insights, and principles for countering organizational practices that inhibit insights.

Participants will have the opportunity practice with the general tactics on topics that are relevant to their professional activities.

Participants will also learn to assess their own organizational structure for features that can promote or interfere with insights, and will identify some opportunities for organizational improvement.

No background is needed. This workshop is designed for a general audience.

No materials are needed. Participants might want to do a read ahead with G. Klein (2013) Seeing what others don't: The remarkable ways we gain insights. New York: PublicAffairs. However, this readahead is not necessary for participating in the workshop.

Introduction to the Foundations of Resilience Engineering: From Science to Pragmatics
  • Dr. David Woods, The Ohio State University
  • Dr. Michael Rayo, The Ohio State University

The workshop will introduce the science behind the practice of Resilience Engineering. The new foundations come in part from studies of how people adapt to cope with complexity (empirical patterns and laws), but many key ideas from very different lines of inquiry unfamiliar to Human Factors (nonlinear dynamics Doyle; complexity Arthur; social science Ostrom; biology Margoulis).

There is a substantial empirical generalizable base of findings about how patterns of adaptation at all scales. And now we have comprehensive theoretical formal foundation(proven theorems) that accounts for these regularities where the general laws (such as Fluency and Stretched Systems or the 3 ways adaptive systems break down) can be derived from first principles. Frankly, the new foundations (Robust yet Fragile Theorem, No Free Lunch Theorem, discovery of Graceful Extensibility as a universal property of all adaptive systems at all scales, Perspective Bounds Theorem, Model Surprise, Tangled Layered Networks, and more) represent a radical reframing of human systems with technology across scales.

The workshop gently helps young researchers and practitioners absorb the radical ideas and see how they can guide practice. The workshop uses exercises developed in the Resilience Engineering course taught at Ohio State since 2008 (the first such course in the world).

Clarifying Human Factors and Related Disciplines: A Design Thinking Workshop to Organize Our Terminology and Techniques
  • Erin Gustafson, Imagine Believe Realize LLC
  • Nicholas Roome, Imagine Believe Realize, LLC
  • Frank Lacson, Imagine Believe Realize, LLC

One persistent issue for the field of Human Factors Engineering (HFE) is that it is often confused with closely related disciplines such as User Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX), Human Centered Design (HCD), and Cognitive Engineering (CE). The proliferation of related disciplines, techniques, and skill sets sends mixed messages to stakeholders and program managers, resulting in the following impacts:

  • Misalignment with job requirements, practitioners’ skills, and required certifications
  • Lack of clarity on user-centered requirements, and compliance with standards
  • Difficulty in communicating HFE and HFE-related Return on Investment (ROI)
  • Confusion on the techniques/analyses/artifacts needed to approach human-centered problems.

Using design thinking techniques, this interactive activity provides the HFES community with a way to share their lessons learned and best practices. We will identify different terms, what they mean to the group, how we define them, and where similarities lie in hopes of providing a starting point of mutual understanding to continue discussion within the Human Factors and adjacent communities.

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