In the 12th Namahn interview, Joannes Vandermeulen explores the world of control room design with Denis Javaux, the Belgian Human Factors and Ergonomics specialist and partner in Symbio. Over the past four years, Symbio has realised a string of major control room designs for industry and critical systems like aviation.
Javaux reveals how 15 years of studying and designing autopilots in aircraft has informed his approach to designing control rooms, where he recognises the same challenges, describing them as cooperative problems. In aircraft, his solution was to design autopilots as a cooperative man-machine system to achieve the general goal (flying the aircraft) as a team. He admits to enjoying the fact of putting humans and machines on an equal footing, in a joint system where human operators and machines work together, each in the area they do best.
The Symbio partnership has successfully brought this idea of a joint man-machine system, where the sum is greater than the parts, to control room design. Regardless of the domain or the client’s bottom line (which runs from enhancing industrial performance, to increasing safety in critical systems), their design approach begins with understanding the function of the control room and then designing the physical environment in relation to that, not vice versa.
Download the interview (mp3, 14:27, 16.5MB, November 2010)
The architecture of control rooms is the final phase. Logically, the building containing the control room should be constructed around it. Unfortunately, until now this has never happened. Javaux and his colleagues still have to work with physical constraints less likely to satisfy all functional requirements.
When asked if it is normal practice to have people like himself involved in such projects Javaux explains that higher the risk (critical systems) the higher the involvement of human factor specialists. However, in an ideal world, he would like to see them involved from the very beginning of every control room design project.