Design for flexibility requires anticipation, preparation, creativity
and experience. Future highly digital sociotechnical systems should
contrast with those stemming from technology-centered engineering that
produces objects and machines with the immensely codified and rigid
practices we know today. Most of the time, current technologies are
designed and developed for normal situations, leaving users to manage
abnormal and emergency situations themselves, sometimes under
unforeseen, extreme and/or dangerous conditions. Putting humans at the
center of the design of flexible sociotechnical systems means
visualizing possible futures, modeling them, simulating them and leading
them down the right paths. This book is for the engineering designers,
who seek to better understand the roles of humans and organizations
developing complex life-critical systems. It is also for those who train
future designers who will have to take into account the well-being,
safety, sustainability and efficiency of the actors of future
sociotechnical systems. It is about an emergent discipline, human
systems integration (HSI). The aim of the flexibility challenge is to
put the artificial at the service of the natural, and not the other way
around.
The author, an aerospace engineering designer, has worked for 40 years
in the field of human-centered design (HCD) of complex systems,
discovering repeatedly that automation leads to rigidity, especially
when things go wrong. It is urgent we had a new paradigm where
flexibility is a major asset in human systems integration. HCD is seen
here as the combination of practices and technologies to come.
