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

Throughout the history of human-machine systems design has had a technological bias in the sense that design for technology came first with 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-centred design had failed, the pendulum swung to the other side taking the human as the centre of things. Yet human-centred design is just as inadequate as machine-centred 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 safety to negotiate the traffic. Design should therefore embrace a function-centred 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-a-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.