Alphonse Chapanis

Alphonse Chapanis was one of the founders of ergonomics or human factors, the science of making design account for human characteristics. He was very active in improving aviation safety around the time of WWII. One of his major contributions was shape coding, where he solved the problem of the controls on a certain model of airplane being confused with each other, partly because they were next to each other. One was for the flaps and one raised the landing gear, so the consequences of operating the wrong one were severe. He attached a wheel to the landing gear control, and a triangle to the flaps. After that there were no more instances of the landing gear being raised while the plane was on the ground.

Related Topics:
Ergonomics - Human factors - Design - Human - Aviation safety - WWII - Shape coding

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