Fisco handheld tape measure, which is featured in the Design Museum's current exhibition, Design Real
Allusions to ergonomics abound: human factors, user-friendly, usability engineering, human-centred design and heuristic evaluation. We are confronted by clumped initials: GUI (graphical user interface), HMI (human-machine interface) and, if you can believe it, TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it). Any comprehensive design initiative inevitably requires such bed companions, and the more the merrier. To dispense with them, it is implied, would be to court universal disapproval.
Once upon a time, it seems to me, it was all so much more straightforward. When Michael Farr became editor of Design magazine, the monthly voice of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID), in 1952, he was determined to shine the bright light of analytical thought on the mysterious practice of design. In particular, he wanted to brandish the baton of ergonomics, a name that was new to all but a few. The word had been employed (some thought invented) by the psychologist Hywel Murrell in a meeting at the UK Admiralty in 1949. He introduced it to encompass the studies on which he had been engaged during and after the Second World War. In fact, ‘ergonomics’ had been coined almost a hundred years before by a Polish biologist, Wojciech Jastrzebowski, in a treatise titled The Outline of Ergonomics, i.e. The Science of Work (1857), and of course, the study of work is as old as the plough, the axe and the pitchfork. You could ask, what’s in a name?
For Farr, though, it was a magic one, bringing together his studies at Cambridge under Nikolaus Pevsner, which resulted in the book, Design in British Industry, 1955, and his wartime experience piloting a Catalina flying boat, one of the most cumbersome and difficult-to-fly aircraft ever invented. Happily, his arrival at Design coincided with the founding of the Ergonomics Society and he was able to demonstrate to his bosses at the CoID that it was a respectable, as well as an up-and-coming, topic for the magazine.
He recruited a stable of writers who explored, each in their own area of expertise, the new topic. They included the applied psychologist Brian Shackel (later Professor of Industrial Ergonomics at Loughborough University), the engineering designer Bruce Archer (later Professor of Design Research at the Royal College of Art) and the industrial systems designer John Christopher Jones (later the first Professor of Design at the Open University and author of Design Methods, a major text on the subject). All shared Farr’s devotion to the newly formed principles of ergonomics, also known as human factors design. They and their editor flung down a gauntlet to the strangely blinkered world of product, furniture and industrial design.
An issue of Design magazine from 1960 when Ken Garland was art editor
Reactions were mixed. Some welcomed their findings and incorporated them happily in their designs for products as diverse as forklift trucks, cutlery and office furniture; others were suspicious, believing their own freedom of action as designers would be improperly constrained by the findings of these interlopers. They had their shibboleths, which they were not going to relinquish without a struggle.
Shackel, Archer, Jones and their fellows were undaunted by this. Their approach challenged the status quo and at one point, the question was raised, why does the design community speak so uncritically of the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Chair and the Charles and Ray Eames Easy Chair? From their perspective, both chairs are ergonomically absurd: the former can only be sat in by a six-foot-four man if his feet are to touch the floor; and the latter has a concave curve in its back giving absolutely no support for the lumbar (lower) area of the spine.
Repeated in certain circles of the design community, this sort of heresy would have led to terminal censure. An undisputed bullseye for ergonomics was scored in the July 1960 issue of Design (by which time Farr had moved up to become Chief Information Officer at CoID, leaving the editorship in the safe hands of his deputy, John E Blake). Titled Designed for Safety and written by J B Davey, an opthalmic optics researcher, it tackled the problem of visibility in the cab design of lorries. Davey was able to record the work on the BMC Austin Series Four’s lorry cab, in which a) the cab door was designed to open in a way that did not extend beyond the overall width of the vehicle, and b) forward visibility was hugely improved by the insertion of curved glass panels below the usual level of windscreen, giving views of small objects and children.
These were standard fittings, not optional extras, and as the author states, ‘any unenlightened operator who demands steel panels [instead of the glass panels] has to pay extra for them.’ Well done Design magazine. Well done ergonomists and well done BMC, you would say: now we’re really motoring. But where are those low-set window panels that reveal the presence of cyclists and children now? Or those canted doors that don’t suddenly open in the face of oncoming traffic? They are nowhere to be seen.
The UK Ergonomics Society is still going strong, and has many sister bodies all over the world; but when did it last hit the headlines? When did its chief executive (whoever he or she is) last lead a mass protest against any one of the many abuses in society resulting from the inhuman design of machines? When was ergonomics last mentioned on Newsnight? Did Michael Farr and his team spend the Fifties and early Sixties shouting their heads off for nothing?
Ken Garland was art editor of Design magazine from 1955-1962, when he established his own graphic design practice, Ken Garland and Associates
The exhibition, Ergonomics: Real Design is at the Design Museum, SE1, 18 November-7 March
