• The original source of this document is no longer available; this is an archived version maintained on this website.
• Back to News Index

Technology's worst nightmare

Canadian researcher Kim Vicente has a message for auto industry: 'We have this division'

By Tim Moran

Originally appeared in Automotive News

Techbit

Name: Kim Vicente
Position: Professor, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto
Age: 39
Accomplishments: Founding director, Cognitive Engineering Laboratory, University of Toronto. Currently Jerome Clark Hudson Visiting Professor, MIT. Author of “Cognitive Work
Analysis: Toward Safe, Productive and Healthy Computer-based Work,” now a required graduate-level text at about a dozen universities in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
Recent tech experience: His tax return was chosen for audit. “If you had a human being look at it, they would have understood it, but the computer is stupid, so it picked it up.”

Where's the beef?

Researcher Kim Vicente says he's frustrated by technology that does not directly help drivers focus on driving. Here are 3 examples.
1. Web access
2. Certain communications devices
3. Colorful digital flat-panel displays

Kim Vicente has saved lives in hospitals and helped prevent nuclear plant accidents by looking at machine design through the eyes and touch of the people who run the things.

But when he sees automobiles with high-tech navigation displays and computerized devices, Vicente shudders at the thought of being on the same road with some of them.

Vicente doesn't work for an automaker or a supplier, but what he has to say about vehicles is worth hearing. He is one of the world's major innovators in human factors engineering for complex systems.

The term "human factors" is shorthand for how people interact with machines, both physically and mentally. Vicente, a University of Toronto (utoronto.ca) researcher, sees a big gap between those who design devices and the people who use them.

"We have this division," Vicente says. "People are trained to look at technology, and for the most part don't look at people. Other people are trained to look at people, and for the most part don't look at technology."

At a time when the industry is paying close attention to driver distraction, IT specialists are increasingly bumping up against limits to human factors as new features and systems are placed in cars.

Auto interior makers have focused on how users expect car interiors to perform and already are doing one thing that Vicente says all technology makers must do: Watch people as they use the technology.

Lear Corp. (lear.com) and Johnson Controls Inc. (jci.com) maintain research labs in which drivers can be observed.

Intier Automotive Inc. (intier.com), which supplies seat mechanisms and interior systems to automakers and suppliers, studies observation when designing its mechanical systems.

Motorola (motorola.com) has gone a step further. It has a team of cultural anthropologists examining how 30 to 40 families use their vehicles. Jacqui Dedo, Motorola marketing vice president, says: "You don't want to give people more than they're capable of handling."

These are good steps, Vicente says, but he adds that observation may miss the bigger questions that surround the human-machine interface - things he may be able to see a little clearer in his role as an observer.

"The biggest problem is this compulsion people face to sort of wreck what is usually a pretty good design to put all this stuff in," he says.

First, new features coming into cars are not standardized, and the lack of consensus leaves drivers at a loss when it comes to finding important things.

Change cars, and it's like crossing an international barrier where the language is different.

Second, the most-equipped cars when it comes to technology are likely going to the wrong users - people who may be unwilling or unable to learn how to use the bells and whistles.

Each camp - the mechanistic view and the humanistic view - has only half the picture, Vicente contends.

Putting on blinders

"It's like everybody's walking around half-blind," Vicente says. "We're carving up the problem so we can't see the answer. It's a really powerful set of blinders."

The automobile is one area where people come together with technology in what Vicente calls a safety-critical system.

"If you're designing Microsoft Word, and the thing bombs, it's a drag and frustrating, but nobody dies," says Vicente, who has spent the past year as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit.edu) while finishing a book that explains why people so often have trouble with technology.

Cars and trucks, on the other hand, are more dangerous than their operators realize.

"It's a really heavy chunk of metal, going really fast, and it can do a lot of damage," the 39-year-old Vicente says. "We know that when we first learn to drive, because we're scared. But that wears off."

It's an observation others share.

Jeff Payne, founder of the national Driver's Edge (driversedge.net) safe driving program for teenagers, based in Nevada, is far from technology-averse.

Some systems, especially head-up displays and light-enhancing windshield displays, can be useful, he says.

But many in-car systems are compensating for something people ought to be better trained to do. Says Payne: "They're bandages to cover the fact that none of us in this country are just trained to drive."

Driver's Edge this year will teach as many as 7,000 teenagers how to recognize safe limits for driving.

Focus on driving

What frustrates Vicente when he looks at vehicles are those with technologies that don't directly help the driver focus on driving. Web access, some communication devices, colorful digital flat-panel displays and entertainment systems don't seem that useful to him.

Part of the problem is with design. Vicente contends that many new-vehicle interiors, accidentally emphasize parts that have nothing to do with critical driving decisions.

A person with limited driving experience could be distracted by prominent decorative elements, a flat panel display screen or complex radio controls, subconsciously treating them as more important than a small gauge or warning light.

In many cars, it's easier to find the radio tuner than it is to identify the headlight control.

Drawing on his experience outside the auto industry, Vicente recalls that he saw something similar while working on a Japanese nuclear plant project where the control panels showed an animated picture of a steam generator, but the generator had no importance to the tasks that were being controlled.

"Your eyes totally went to it, but you had no information," he says.

One detail of automotive technology that perplexes Vicente is the introduction of systems that require drivers to navigate through sequential layers of information to accomplish tasks, such as the BMW iDrive.

Carmakers, he contends, have not done a good job of measuring the amount of time spent driving compared with time spent interacting with the interface in some systems.

When challenged, the engineers who made it possible for the systems to be included in the vehicle often say the systems are fine and that it's simply a matter of drivers getting used to them.

But that's the problem, Vicente says. Drivers should not face that kind of learning curve. "Navigating a menu structure should not be part of driving," says Vicente, founder of the University of Toronto's Cognitive Engineering Laboratory. "We should have the opposite: Transparent stuff where you don't even think about it."

Vicente is particularly dubious about the human-machine interface, even when it comes to hands-free telephone communication.

Brain blip

"The problem isn't the hand," he says. "It's the brain. That's the bottleneck. People forget that."

Vicente sees a propagating effect from drivers distracted by a telephone conversation; the phone-involved driver, faced with an emergency, doesn't have a good picture of the driving environment. He or she may make a successful swerve, but at a critical cost to another driver. If that driver, too, is involved in a phone conversation, there may not be enough time to avoid an accident.

"You're talking to someone else who is not there, and trying to drive at the same time," he says. "The difference between that and a conversation with a passenger is the passenger has another set of eyes, so they can warn you."