Human Performance in Sociotechnical Systems

Designing sociotechnical systems and optimizing human performance is paramount for achieving efficiency, safety, and reliability. The nature of human contribution to these systems has been investigated from multiple perspectives, ranging from short-term cognitive to longer-term social processes. Each perspective seeks to understand and optimize human performance. However, many of these perspectives have evolved independently, leading to fragmented views of the overall system. This chapter introduces a time-based framework for conceptualizing human performance within sociotechnical systems, which can help to integrate across disparate disciplines and research domains. We explore human performance processes over three timeframes (short-term, mid-term, and long-term) and discuss how each timeframe has different implications for understanding the overall sociotechnical system. We also explore how the timeframes can contribute to the system design process. This includes drawing links between varying research domains to shared design goals and informing more systematic and comprehensive human criteria for system design and evaluation.