Alex Kirlik
Sitting in his second floor niche in the Beckman Institute, Alex Kirlik gestures with a broad, sweeping arc of his right arm, pointing out the typical trappings of the modern office environment. In his office are the requisite computer components such as display screens and hard-cased processors, as well as other manmade artifacts like a table lamp, and pages and pages of paper in book, journal, and printout form. Kirliks gesture concludes with a forefinger pointing at the sole of his shoe.
"Look around here and I cant find anything except for maybe some dirt on the bottom of my shoe that is part of the same environment in which Homo sapiens evolved, Kirlik says. We have radically altered the environments in which we live, and I firmly believe that a relevant and important area of inquiry in psychology, cognitive science, social sciences generally, is trying to gain an understanding of the interdependence of human cognition, human behavior, and the designed environment."
Kirliks view is that the interdependence he describes is symbiotic: technology isnt simply an end-product of human intelligence; it also serves to mediate peoples interactions with their environments and that process affects cognition and behavior. Understanding those interactions and the technology that supports them is at the heart of Kirliks discipline of human factors.
"Certainly I belong to a large and growing research community of people who do believe that there is a very intimate interplay between human cognition and behavior and the technological tools and support that we have available in our environments," Kirlik said.
" technology has increasingly shifted the domains in which we use and execute judgment and decision-making to ones in which our interaction with the environment is mediated in some way by information technology."
Alex Kirlik
Kirlik, a member of Beckman's Human Perception and Performance group, is acting head of the Human Factors Division at the University of Illinois. The program began in the 1940s with a focus on the human factors aspect of aviation, but now covers a number of areas involving human interaction with technology. Kirlik said about one-half of the Human Factors Division faculty earned their Ph.D.s in psychology, about one-quarter earned theirs in engineering, and the rest are from fields such as computer science and information science.
"Im interested in all aspects of human interaction with technology," said Kirlik, whose Ph.D. is in industrial engineering. I view technology very broadly as the constructed world. We live today in the United States in almost entirely constructed eco-niches."
That ecology of technology can be found in a cubicle filled with desks and chairs surrounded by office equipment, in a cockpit brimming with electronic flight systems, or in a stairwell lit by exit signs and colored light bulbs. That means Kirliks research accommodates a broad range of topics and settings. His recent work has looked at decision-making and judgment through a study involving pilot decisions on runways and another project testing expert judgment using fantasy baseball league players.
Kirliks research into human factors isnt just for scientific purposes. He believes scientists should be involved members of the community, and that belief is one reason he joined a team advising the architectural firm that designed the first building rebuilt after Sept. 11. The 7 World Trade Center building, destroyed in the attacks that brought down the Twin Towers, was rebuilt and completed in 2006 with human factors taken into account in emergency exit situations, thanks in large part to Kirlik and a team from the University of Illinois.
The human factors elements that Kirlik helped bring to the finished project included using photoluminescent paint and additional lighting in stairwell areas, as well as expanding stairwell width above code to aid in emergency exit. He based his recommendations on known human factors research in those areas and upon his reading of a FEMA report on building performance issues during 9/11.
The events of 9/11 also factor into his work in another way. The attacks added an element of uncertainty a topic that is a focus of Kirliks research into human judgment to the lives of Americans.
"I would speculate that events such as 9/11 have created perhaps increased interest in living with uncertainty, coping with uncertainty, and in understanding that we often live in times and in situations of irreducible uncertainty, however much we might not want to believe that," Kirlik said.
Kirliks research has shown the need for including uncertainty into formal models of human judgment. A project by Kirlik and his students that looked at how pilots navigate runways and taxi surfaces at airports developed a successful computer model that mimicked human cognition and performance, proving its validity by making the same mistakes that pilots did on the runways at Chicago's O'Hare airport.