Essay Awareness Essays This paper continues *JCD's "awareness" series, in which a SIGDOC commentator calls attention to what he or she regards as interesting and documentation-relevant recent trends, problems, or publications in some related field. Human(e) Factors: A Catalyst For The Past, Present And Future Kenneth R. Ohnemus CSC Cincinnati, Ohio kohnemus@csc.com he goal of this paper is to introduce the audience to human factors by defining and providing a brief history of the field. The human factors focus will be on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In addition to identifying pertinent professional societies and journals and books of interest, this essay will also touch on human factors in general, concluding with a discussion of future directions and challenges for the human factors field. T Since this article is part of an awareness series it is prudent to first provide a definition of and introduction to the field of human factors. Chapanis (1991) defines human factors as follows: "Human factors is a body of knowledge about human abilities, human limitations and other human characteristics that are relevant to the design of tools, machines, systems, tasks, jobs and environments for productive, safe, comfortable and effective human use." Simply stated, "human factors
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