Alphonse Chapanis (March 17, 1917 – October 4, 2002) was an American pioneer in the field of
industrial design, and is widely considered one of the fathers of
ergonomics or human factors – the science of ensuring that
design
A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design' ...
takes account of human characteristics.
Biography
Chapanis received a PhD in Psychology from Yale University in 1943.
He was notably active in improving
aviation safety
Aviation safety is the study and practice of managing risks in aviation. This includes preventing aviation accidents and incidents through research, educating air travel personnel, passengers and the general public, as well as the design of airc ...
around the time of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, although his career covered a wide range of domains and applications.
One of his major contributions was
shape coding in the aircraft
cockpit. After a series of runway crashes of the
Boeing B-17
The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress is a four-engined heavy bomber developed in the 1930s for the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC). Relatively fast and high-flying for a bomber of its era, the B-17 was used primarily in the European Theater ...
, Chapanis found that certain cockpit controls were confused with each other, due partly to their proximity and similarity of shape. Particularly, the controls for
flaps and
landing gear
Landing gear is the undercarriage of an aircraft or spacecraft that is used for takeoff or landing. For aircraft it is generally needed for both. It was also formerly called ''alighting gear'' by some manufacturers, such as the Glenn L. Martin ...
were confused, the consequences of which could be severe. Chapanis proposed attaching a wheel to the end of the landing gear control and a triangle to the end of the flaps control, to enable them to be easily distinguished by touch alone. Thereafter for that aircraft there were no further instances of the landing gear being mistakenly raised while the aircraft was still on the ground. This particular shape-coding of cockpit controls is still used today.
In 1949 he published the first textbook on the subject of
ergonomics
Human factors and ergonomics (commonly referred to as human factors) is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Four primary goals of human factors learnin ...
, ''Applied Experimental Psychology: Human Factors in Engineering Design''.
In the 1950s, Chapanis worked with
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...
on the design of
push-button telephone handsets, conducting experiments that led to the present layout of the keys.
References
Further reading
*''The Chapanis Chronicles'' (1999 autobiography)
*''
The Human Factor'' by
Kim Vicente
External links
Brief Biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chapanis
American industrial engineers
20th-century American engineers
1917 births
2002 deaths