MAKE IT WORK

I'm not much for the new popular genre of reality shows on television, but there's one show on cable that I watch called "Project Runway." The premise is simple: 15 clothes designers, three judges, one style guru who acts as mentor, and one supermodel as host.

Each week, the contestants go up against one another in curious challenges. One week they were bused to a recycling plant where they had a few minutes to pick up as much garbage as they could, put it in bags, then design and sew a dress out of all the junk. In another episode they were taken to the Hershey's Times Square Store here in New York City and had five minutes to bag as much stuff as they wanted. They were told to make a dress out of whatever they picked out. At the end of each show, models strut the designs down a runway as the three judges (metaphorically speaking) rip up their work. One designer goes home, as the others survive to the next challenge. It's all loads of fun (including the diva-type drama), as the designers demonstrate exceptional creativity.

Amidst encouragement from the enigmatic mentor, Tim Gunn, to "make it work," some of the final designs simply look like they're literally made of garbage. Others are surprisingly good.

What the best competitors inherently understand is that their designs have to be crafted with the wearer in mind. So what that someone's created a wonderful dress, if it fits the body like a beanbag?

In any product design, the most successful ones are typically those that have the users, or human factors, in mind. This seems like a simple concept, but amazingly, it's often overlooked.

At last year's special Think Tank Summit in Toronto—where ASME held a special session on Human Factors Engineering (you can see it by following the Think Tank Summit video link online at www.memagazine.org)—and then again last November during ASME's International Congress, I spoke with several engineering department heads from across the country and found, to my surprise, that few curriculums include human factors courses, let alone require them. This seems at odds with the purpose of nurturing students to become successful engineers.

Some trace the origins of human factors to World War II, when aircraft cockpits were designed so that there was congruence between the pilot and the controls and displays. Design engineers focused on the technology, and industrial psychologists worked to optimize the interface.

It makes sense that social scientists remain active in this area. Human factors research extends to how humans interact with technology at the cognitive level. Considering human factors is not only crucial to creating safer environments, such as the cockpit of a plane, but is also important for the profitability of a company.

As associate editors Alan Brown and Jean Thilmany eloquently tell us in their respective articles inside this issue, attention to human factors often is what makes the difference between a product that sells, and one that gathers dust on the shelves.

A whopping 89 percent of those who answered our latest online survey told us that consideration of human factors is vitally important to the success of a design. And because so many engineers agree on that, the obvious question is: Why not integrate human factors more broadly in engineering curriculums? In the words of Tim Gunn, make it work.

—John G. Falcioni, Editor-in-Chief
He can be reached by e-mail at falcionij@asme.org