Human factors engineering can be linked to the early ergonomics we talked about earlier. With the Second World War, new and very complex machines were built by engineers.

Here, you couldn’t take an approach where humans had to adapt themselves to the machines but rather the machines had to be adapted to the humans as these machines were often too complex to begin with. A lot of research about the limitations and capabilities of humans happened before, during, and after the war.

A good example of this shift in thinking can be seen in 1947. Fits and Jones, two crazy engineers studied what was the most effective way to configure the control knobs for aircraft cockpits.

Service Designers today share this optimistic view of the environment and tools. It is not the tools that have to shape how humans behave. No, as Service Designers, we want the behavior of humans to shape how the service we create work. We see here the premises of a human-centered approach in the engineering or design world.

This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.