Handbook

The increasing reliance upon technological innovation, from pervasive digital computing in everyday smart phone and smart infrastructures to new forms of intelligent materials and pharmaceutical augmentation, is changing the nature of human-technology relationships.  These changes are in turn having a major impact on the nature of human behaviour and the ways in which governments, defence, policy makers and intelligence services understand, predict and transform collective and individual human action. Traditionally the study of human factors has centred on scientific questions but this course widens the focus to address the broader transformation of human behaviour in ways that bring together contemporary debates in anthropology, philosophy, behavioural science and technology studies through practical case-studies and application.

This course focuses upon the human factors influencing effective decision-making in a range of technological interface scenarios to offer invaluable insights into how courses of action are chosen from within mundane, novel and complex situations. The proliferation of technological interfaces, both digital and biological, raises new questions about the autonomy and reliability of the human when the location and agency, the where and who, of decision-making is no longer clear cut. These questions shape contemporary concerns in politics, ethics and security.

Looking at a series of technological interface scenarios the role of human factors in decision-making processes can be better understood through an attention to the role technology is playing in reshaping the context of human behaviour.  Contexts will range from collective and team performance within hierarchical command structures to emerging spontaneous crowd behaviour, from augmented individual biological performance through skill and training to diminished mental and physical capability of stress and fatigue, and from the agency of code, digital mediation and matter to the spatial and temporal questions of architecture and duration.

The social science of recent technological innovations will present students with an exciting opportunity to examine, evaluate and critique the emergence of new kinds of behaviour at the evolving interface of human and machine. The course is designed to provide students with an understanding of what human factors are, including habit, trust, team performance, individual mental and physical skill, affect and endurance, with particular attention paid to scenarios where technology has both an intensive and extensive influence on decision-making and behavioural change. Students will bring together information to analyse how human factors shape, and are reshaped by, technological interfaces through a qualitative social science perspective.