Cheese-colored Cheese? Insufferable!
June 12th, 2007Interesting article today in the New York Times about companies lobbying to sneak nonorganic ingredients into foods labeled organic. A good reminder that a company’s perception of the marketplace is just as important as the consumer’s perception of the product.
John Foraker, chief executive of Annie’s Homegrown, argued that nonorganic annatto was a crucial ingredient in the company’s macaroni and cheese. “Organic annatto is not readily available and does not deliver the same cheese color… Making orange colored macaroni and cheese is an important element of our offering. Without annatto, our macaroni-and-cheese products would be white.”
That’s right.
Annie’s is terrified about what will happen if their “organic” macaroni and cheese becomes the color of macaroni and cheese.
Redesigning Earth.
June 10th, 2007
One of the things we do as engineering psychologists is help predict the consequences of changes to existing systems, for example by creating Failure Modes and Effects Analyses (FMEA).
I thought I had pondered this kind of risk management on a very large scale until I heard NASA Administrator Michael Griffin’s comments about Global Warming.
The many faces of evil…
June 4th, 2007This one is for the aviation psych geeks: The famous approach into Runway 16 at Portsmouth. Yes, this is a real chart, and there are many more like it.
If you don’t get the joke, click here and read the catch phrases in the box on the right side.
PS. The arbitrary nature of airspace markers is actually a serious concern for aviation psychologists, particularly when foreign aviators have to grapple with these cutesy little phonetic games. Fortunately, ITAWA, ITAWT, and TATT are something of an exception. Most identifiers with similarly pronounceable names aren’t so close to each other.
Experiments are not valid.
May 29th, 2007
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is experimental validity in the mind of the inferrer.*
If this sounds like nonsense, I heartily recommend the following lit review by Albright and Malloy.**
Albright, L., Malloy, T.E. (2000) Experimental validity: Brunswik, Campbell, Cronbach, and enduring issues. Review of General Psychology, Vol 4(4), Dec 2000. pp. 337-353.
Many psychologists are trained since undergrad to think of “validity” as a property of experiments that must be protected, via randomization, from a constant barrage of “threats.” That view, like most things we learn as undergrads, is useful but simplistic. (An experiment is a historical event–how can events be invalid? And what, exactly, have we chosen to randomize?)
When the goal is to explore uncharted territory, where causal structures are murky and randomization is impossible, it becomes clear that there’s more to validity than just independent variables, randomization tables, and threat checklists.
Okay, I’m being diplomatic. Albright and Malloy are more direct. “Most social scientists do not understand internal validity,” they say in their abstract.
Clever design = International intrigue
May 8th, 2007The Associated Press reported a story today that reminded me of the challenges one can face when introducing radically new designs to a naive user group.
A few years ago, the Canadian mint used a new technique to create a 25 cent coin featuring a red poppy inlay. The poppy flower is Canada’s symbol of Remembrance Day, a national time of mourning similar to Memorial Day in the United States.
But nobody explained that to the U.S. Army.
Photo by the Royal Canadian Mint.
Military contractors traveling through Canada–and apparently doing a little shopping– convinced themselves that foreign agents were sneaking radio transmitters into their wallets.
ISAP 2007 Panel
April 24th, 2007I just finished chairing a panel on Designing, Evaluating and Training Flight Decks of the Future at the International Symposium on Aviation Psychology in Dayton, Ohio. The title, although expansive, was meant to link together recent research on new flight deck designs, and address the training issues that have traditionally prevented innovation in aviation.
(Lately, the rage in the industry is “flight deck commonality,” meaning that cockpits are designed to be similar to each other, allowing pilots to be certified once for a whole range of aircraft. This reduces the training costs of an airline, but fosters a least-common-denominator approach to interface design, encouraging manufacturers to keep old, questionable interaction schemes.)
My panelists included Dr. Vic Riley, Carl Smith, and Dr. Deborah Boehm-Davis. Attendance was sparse at the start, but we quickly built up an audience and had a pretty productive session. Our time slot was right before lunch, which was good because a fair chunk of the audience chose to stick around to chat about our work.
Now, I can enjoy the rest of the conference.
Backhanded Compliments
April 19th, 2007
Those of us in experimental psychology often feel misunderstood. Witness the backhanded compliment paid to psychologists in an otherwise fascinating article by Bill Mckibben in the March issue of Mother Jones.
“Reversal of Fortune” is an article about the importance of creating more realistic models of human behavior in economics–about how too many material goods can actually result in unhappiness. The author introduces the work of Nobel prize winning psychologist, Dr. Daniel Kahneman. Dr. Kahneman conducted groundbreaking research into decision making that showed how irrational people can be in their choices. The article goes on to explain how rigorously those experiments were controlled.
Then the backhanded compliment:
If you are worried that there might be something altogether too airy about this, be reassured—Kahneman thinks like an economist.
The Adaptive Digital Dashboard
November 29th, 2006
A year after the iDrive redesign, Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman and I reunited for another automotive project. This one was a contest entry in the 2006 International Award in Design, Engineering and Innovation in the field of Automotive Human Factors.
The competition was sponsored by some prety big names, including the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (icsid) and the Italdesign-Giugiaro group, who are famous for their work on concept cars.
Driving Design: Redesigning the iDrive
October 20th, 2006
This was a project I completed with Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman, and Nicholas Prada, to redesign BMW’s first automotive computer interface, the iDrive.
Evaluating Boeing’s Flight Deck of the Future
October 20th, 2006
Most people don’t know that modern airliners run on autopilot almost all the time. In fact, newer planes are technically capable of completing an entire flight with almost no input from humans.
Sadly, the interfaces that control these incredibly complicated automated flight computers date back to the 1970’s, and many important human factors studies have uncovered serious usability problems (ie, Sarter & Woods, 1995; Sherry et al, 2002).