Reducing the 'human factor': a blog by Steven Shorrock, Humanistic Systems (2015)

Summary

Steven Shorrock is an interdisciplinary humanistic, systems and design practitioner interested in human work from multiple perspectives.

The term 'human factor' is rarely defined, but people often refer to reducing it. In this blog, Steven asks what are we actually reducing?

Content

In this blog, Steven questions:

• Are we reducing the human to ‘human error’? 
• Are we reducing the human to a faulty information processing machine? 
• Are we reducing the human to emotional aberrations? 
• Are we reducing human involvement in socio-technical systems?