A function-centred approach to joint driver-vehicle system design

Abstract

Throughout the history human–machine systems design has had a technological bias in the sense that design for technology came first and design for humans as a distant second. Over the years this situation became untenable because the growing system complexity made a decomposition approach to design inadequate. Seeing that technology-centered design had failed, the pendulum swung to the other side taking the human as the center of things. Yet human-centered design is just as inadequate as machine-centered design, since it implies a dichotomy where one part of the system is seen as opposed to the other. This applies not least to the case of automotive environments, where the interaction has a clear purpose, namely safely to negotiate the traffic. Design should therefore embrace a function-centered view where the focus is the joint driver-vehicle system. Design should serve to further the purposes or goals of the joint system, i.e., to be in control vis-à-vis the dynamic traffic environment, by taking the relative strengths and limitations of the components into account and by describing the system on multiple levels.