Welcome to Human Factors Cast, your weekly podcast for human factors, psychology and design.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to a special conference, bonus episode episode of Human Factors Cast. It feels like it's been a little bit since we've done one of these. We're recording this live on May 12. I'm your host, Nick Rome. And on this episode, we're recapping EHF, Ergonomics and Human Factors Conference 2022, with somebody who's a regular guest of the show. But today he's going to be on in a little bit different of a capacity. Mr. Barry Kirby, President elect of CIEHF, the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. Barry, welcome back to the show. Feels weird to welcome you in a different capacity, so. Hi. Hi. Great to be here. Great to have you. Barry. Can I get your general thoughts on EHF before we dig into everything? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, 2022 was brilliant. Quite frankly. It was a test of so many different things, having that hybrid of a live and a virtual event, of having just basically getting back together as a community and being able to talk, to be able to have a glass of wine, to be able to chew over the paper you just listened to. And from a very personal perspective, certainly the live element was the first time I've been to the conference was my first time meeting people as President elect. And so I looked at it, I think through very different eyes, I've been able to see what works, what doesn't, what were people liking? And to almost take that Usability view, that research view of is it delivering what we want to deliver? So, yeah, it was a very new and very interesting experience for me. So I realized we kind of jumped the shark here. What is EHF? Let's talk about what it actually is a little bit. Can you explain what the conference is about? Yeah. So Ergonomics and Human Factors is organized by the Chartered Institute, the Chartered Institute of Economics and Human Factors here in the UK. It is the flagship conference for the Charters Institute. It is an international conference. Historically, it's always been over three, four days based in different parts of the UK. It's been that one place where people can come to and there's normally, I guess, any typical conference has it has the streams on different human factor subjects, ranging from defense all the way through to health and that type of thing. So from that perspective, it's normally very typical. What you'd expect. What I do like about EHF is it normally has a really good social side to it as well. So before the pandemic, there would always be two nights of entertainment. The first night was normally some sort of quiz or an event which Tina Worthy, who's one of the staff at the conference, and we'll be hearing a little bit from her later on. She normally does this sort of quiz, but then they have done other things as well, which there was like a murder mystery dinner night, one of the previous ones where I got to take part and I was one of the actors in that, which was a very different thing. And normally the second night has always been the conference dinner, which has always been a nice opportunity to get on your best clothes and have some nice food and some nice conversation. So it's always had that really good balance between doing the learning stuff during the day and doing the socially interacting stuff, not only in the coffee breaks, but in the evenings as well. Yeah, we call that drinking after hours networking. That is what we call it. So I want to talk a little bit about the venue. Right. Because in the past, in the last couple of years, we had this pandemic that we all kind of lived through, which is very traumatizing in a lot of ways. What has it been like? You mentioned kind of these sort of get togethers, these gatherings. What has the venue itself been like, the structure in the physical capacity. But then how did it adapt over the sort of pandemic phase? Yeah. So historically prepandemic, it was normally always a physical conference. I guess here in terms of organization, it's quite generic in that respect. There was no go through either different hotels or different conference suites. So physically it was in that sort of very generic wherever we were going to have it at that time, consisting of your keynotes, it would have your breakout to your streams and consist of either lectures, workshops, that type of stuff. So I think I don't think I'm doing anybody to service by saying it would be quite a traditional conference, obviously, with the associated bar and all that sort of stuff for evenings during the pandemic. It really stepped up its game night. And again, I think not putting anybody's nose out of Joe by saying, actually, I think the CIAF excelled delivering the online conference when they did in the 2020. And then 20, 21, 20, 20, they made the decision to go to virtual conference within I think it was like a week or two weeks because that conference was in April, and obviously we went into lockdown until that March time or early April. And so they had to turn it around. Obviously, we knew something was happening. We knew something was coming, but the CIA team and the Secretariat turned around that to be a virtual conference. So you had one stream live, but also with the chat facilities and all that sort of stuff. And they still ran out that over two days. And they did that in 2021 to great effect. I think people stepped up their game in terms of recording their papers and being present in the chat and realizing you can actually have that sort of chat and being able to we had better attendance at that than anything else because I think people could attend from all around the world and did so that was really effective. And then this year was really good as well, because we took a review of saying what worked well during the Pandemic. What was it missing? What did we like about what was happening before? And we basically did them both, which was fantastic. So this year we had the two things. We had a virtual session and then we had the in person session separated by a couple of weeks. So you didn't feel like you have to go bang, bang, bang, bang and take a whole lot of time out. But we did the virtual session and that, for me was fantastic. So the first session, the first day was dedicated to sustainability, which anybody who's listening to anything that I've been talking about recently, I've been very much into the whole climate thing, the whole climate economics piece that we've been driving, and we got the ability to do the opening interview, the opening keynote, there's a couple of papers that me and my team were delivering, as well as have a really good panel session. But what was really neat about that panel session, about that in that entire session is the chair was chairing. It from Australia. One of the key speakers that we had as part of it, was coming from South Africa, and then three of us were coming from Wales here in the UK, and it was just seamless, it just worked. And then people were commenting in the chat and asking questions from literally around the world. So you wouldn't have been able to get that sort of accessibility by doing it live. You won't be able to get that sort of interaction by doing it live. But what it did miss was that ability to have the corridor conversations, the coffee conversations, the in the bar, the conversations, and just generally that the more fun aspect. We sort of say network. They're generally just having a laugh with people, which we so solely needed over the past few years. And so we did a whole load of that in the live session. So it was only two days. I went down on the night before and so I had grand plans of going down the night before and having some food and getting an early night because I said this was my first time as President elect. I didn't want to disgrace myself or anything like that. I still didn't go to bed until about 01:00 in the morning. So it was just so nice to be able to see people and talk to people. But having that live event, then the second night we had the dinner, which was again nice just to be able to chat to people. But during the sessions themselves, we had packed sessions. We had three streams on both days and they were packed with both live presentations. And there were some because people are now so used to recording their presentations. We had backup presentations. So there was a few people who dropped out right at the last minute because of code with another reason. And we were able to say rather than having to really juggle around with the schedule, we're like, well, we've got your video here. We can just play that and it works and it's brilliant. So we learned a lot, and it was really neat. Rather than having a quiz this time, we had a magician, magician. I saw a magician in the notes I was waiting for. You haven't talked about. Like I said, Tina would normally do a quiz in the past, but we had a magician, and the guy was really good. He did it, and he did some really quite impressive stuff, though. We did spend most of the session trying to work out how he did what he did and probably worked out 9% of it fairly quickly. But when he was trying to tell jokes and stuff like that, he would also then say, so what is this, human factors? And so human factors, he would get a massive cheer for all this other stuff. He wouldn't. So then he would just randomly turn around and just say human factors and get a big cheer from the room. And it's one of these things. He didn't know quite why he was getting a cheer, but he knew he was getting a cheer. And so it worked quite well. But again, it was just interesting to just to have a different bunch of entertainment. The other bit that worked really well with this whole hybrid live virtual bit is normally they would have the AGM as part of the part of the live conference during the Pandemic. Obviously, we couldn't do that. So we had a virtual AGM. We had more people attend the AGM than we ever have done because it was easier just to dip into and go to and anybody could access it. You didn't have to be going to the conference. And so that's what we've done. We've kept the AGM virtual, which meant really quick, just for those who don't know, AGM is your annual general meeting, where all the officers and your representatives, the people who you trustees and all that sort of thing, they're all elected or confirmed. Their elections are confirmed. So you know who your President is going to be, your President elect, which is me, and all that sort of stuff. So we knew before going to the livelihood of the conference that what the positions were going to be, because it also meant that we could actually have a first sort of executing there as well. First meeting at the live conference, which was also incredibly useful. So, yeah, there was a lot I think we've learned there's a lot of stuff that I think we've got. We did get really right this time. We can improve. We can definitely can, because I think you always can. But I think as a first event coming out of COVID, I think the team did a fantastic job. And going back to the idea that this was my first time of looking at this from a President elect perspective, I guess it really made me appreciate just how much work and effort goes into doing a conference, which I perhaps hadn't appreciated before. So you've got the entire staff team, which the CIHF has quite a small staff team compared to with the likes of HFCs and others. There's a small number of people doing an awful lot of work, and they just make magic happen in the background. And it's amazing. Then you got the conference Secretary out themselves, who normally volunteers and that type of thing, again, being really cool, just making sure everything flows and just making sure everything is brilliant. Then you've got the conference team who puts all the papers together and all that sort of stuff. So many people have put in so much effort to make something look seamless and flawless. I just find it stunning together. It really is one of those things where you realize just how few, I should say, how few people are actually involved in conference prep in a lot of cases. And it really just pulls the whole thing together. And yeah, it's kind of really interesting to look at that sometimes because you're like, how are you doing all this? Are you the magician? Anyway, so let's get into sort of your experience with the thing, right? I mean, we talked a little bit about the venue. We talked about what it is. I think I want to hear some of the kind of key takeaways that you have. Like, what did you find interesting? What are some key themes that you heard about, watched, listened to, participated in, et cetera? So one of the things that happened right from the start of the live conference, which was the new President, Alex Edmond, he encouraged us all to go and engage in a theme that we're not used to outside of our comfort zone, which people say that. But this time I was like, you know, what I'm going to most of my background is in defense and technology and tools and methods and that type of thing, aviation. So I spent quite a lot of my time in health and the theme around well being and theme around health, and I spent quite a lot of time in them, which was fascinating. And there was some really good discussion. So particularly in the live. But there were some really good, interesting discussions around the applications of different methods, such as safety one and safety two. And there was real good discussion about why some people thought one was better than the other and how the evidence base would come out, how they're trying to develop different ways of patients, being able to engage with staff and with the medical professionals and give them better awareness about when things were maybe going wrong and how they could input and things like that. And it really gave me a different perspective on how I see the health industry, particularly when you go to the doctors or you go to hospital, your experience. So I'd actually gone the week after week or so after the conference and went to get some blood tests. And it was because of some of the discussions that were going on in the housing that made me really think about the usability of the hospital from the moment you walk in the door and some of that stuff. So that was really fascinating. The other bit that was really good is we had a keynote from the Ministry of Transport around where they've done some experimentation and some ideas about how to get better messaging across for wearing face masks and things during Kobe, about being more respectful around other people and your behavior. And they've done a whole bunch of different things about looking at different ways of projecting influence. So do you put a positive message? So like if you wear a mask, you could be saving your neighbor or a negative message or a more stern message around you should be wearing a mask or you'll be fined type of thing. So just look at different ways of influencing. But what was fantastic and fascinating was the amount of people because they were doing with basically people who are out there, they could have massive participation numbers. I mean, you're talking about N being so the number of participants being like tens and hundreds of thousands of people, rather than just like ten. Yeah. And so they could really drive out some really good science out of what they've been doing and really Ironically influence how we do things and how we do some of that message. So them sort of things were fascinating. There was the automation is obviously a big thing. And we had one of the well, quite a few different talks around automation, not only around the obvious of cars and things like that, but also exoskeletons and things like that. We actually had a live demo of some exoskeletons, which was great. And you could go and have a play with them. In terms of talks, there are some really fascinating ones. And what I like about this conference is it's really there for people. If you're giving your first conference talk, it's a really safe space to do it. Everybody's really friendly. You might get some tough questions, but they're not unfair questions. It's a really nice place to work. But also there are some people who can stand up and really give some breadth of experience of what they've been to. And the one that did it for me here, I also had the privilege of introducing it was Susie Broadband. Now, Susie is somebody who's worked in the human factors domain primarily in defense for a number of years, which is why I know her but she gave the annual Institute lecture and really she gave it around fundamentally. Why do we need human factors? What's human factors all about from her perspective? And she comes at this from a really practical perspective. So when we're trying to highlighting the fact that we would love to be able to do our methods properly and particularly dependent. You'd love high participant numbers. You'd like to get a properly beautifully crafted methodology on how you're going to engage around whatever the topic is. But sometimes it's just not practical. Sometimes you just can't do it. And do you just get down and dirty with what you've got, or do you just call the whole thing off? Well, obviously you never call the whole thing off. You make deal with what you've got and you try and make the best of every situation. But it's not often you get somebody who's willing to stand up and say that. And it did cause quite nicely a bit of almost controversy afterwards. So I'm the one there was chairing the session to have to handle the questions. And you immediately got some of that academic thing saying, well, I think it's almost irresponsible people standing up and saying that you shouldn't take into account proper academic methods. So proper methods and stuff. And I was like, well, as soon as you quite ready stood up for yourself and say, that's not what I was saying. If you can do the proper methods, you absolutely should, because that's what they're there for and they're good. But quite often in the scheme of things, you can't. And so part of what we try to do as human factors practitioners is tailor what we're doing as best we possibly can. But the entire tour was fascinating, and she's gone on now to work in a different domain where she's actually an investigator and using them skills going forward as well. So it's really interesting to see where she's going next, but also bringing some of them Kieran experiences from her experience and her career. But just that bringing together of academic and professional was real. You could almost see it was really valuable for the new people, the people who are either students or new into the profession, going, okay, that's the way that real life works. I like that. But also for some of us who've been around for maybe slightly longer, going, yeah, please. Somebody's had the ability to go get up and say that, because quite often we all know it, but we don't often say it

in terms of big moments. What am I going to take away personally? It was an incredible experience being having that thing as a President elect that was seeing it through new eyes, that was fantastic. Being live was just brilliant this time. I so didn't take it for granted this time. It was very much of that whole piece around doing some really cool stuff, talking to people and engaging. Love that, love the ability in the virtual sessions to be promoted, to promoting the sustainability. But that is something I think all of us are taking a lot more seriously. So talking to people who work in this field a lot like the likes of Andrew Thatcher and people like that, and hopefully building some bridges there, which I think is really good. But one of the things I did quite like as a thing was I did one of the wrap up talks at the end to wrap up the conference and send people on their Merry way. And it was just one of the comments I made, which I think is so true, is during the Pandemic, we could have all just sat at home, you listen to some community and you think that everybody did just sit at home, do nothing. But everybody could have said to him, do nothing. Nobody thought any different, nobody blamed them. But all the papers, all the research that had gone on was all reflecting on things that happened through Curvy 19, running Airlines or working in the health industry or whatever it was. So clearly people have been thinking, people have been doing their research. People hadn't turned around and said, oh, we'll just take two years off. People have got some really solid stuff. So we've got some really solid learning out of the out of Curbing 19 to then take forward and do bigger and better things with everybody took that opportunity and I just thought that was amazing. So to have that honor of being able to wrap up and reflect on some of them things was just a distinct honor. So there was so much more that went on as well. But I think we probably covered all the high points. Any other key takeaways that you took away from this conference that you will take with you in the future going forward? Yeah, I think so. I think this whole live virtual thing is a revelation. It sounds obvious now because we've all been living it, but that whole been able to optimize for both and do both. I'm still not entirely convinced on hybrid, which I know different episodes. We've talked about that in the past. Yeah, maybe. But this whole being able to do the virtual bit and really use that virtual bit to its maximum extent and then do the live and really make the most of that live bit as well and really squeeze both methods for all you can get, it's just absolute genius. And we can keep on honing it and we can then also teach other people what we've done in our lessons and hopefully other people will be able to get the best of it as well. But that and the people behind it who make that happen, make it all happen, and make it all just happen. Like it's just Pixie dust in the background is brilliant. All right, Barry. Well, we've heard from you now. Let's go hear from some folks who went to the conference. I understand you brought us a prepared clip. Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of clips and a different number of people you'll hear from, including people who are organizing it, people who are part of the Secretariat, some of the people who were session chairs, and some people who just attended. All right, well, here they are. I think I was starting to forget really what a lovely, caring, sort of funny collective bunch of people we have in the Institute and people who come along just come along to the event for the first time or it's people we don't know, nonmembers. We have lots of non members coming along. But I think I was starting to forget that element. So it was really nice to get back together and just to see that and remember again, just being there and realizing what a great community we are, really, and what a great bunch we are. And there are so many brilliant people. I think my main one is definitely getting to meet the people who I've read so much about. I really did feel like I was in a room of celebrities. I know that sounds really strange, but I had seen so many people's names in papers, white papers, Twitter have given the opportunity to actually go up to them and be like, you're presenting, lady, and you've got my PowerPoint. Can you send it? I just that annoying person in their faces and meet them. And it was just amazing. I particularly loved that I was surrounded by people who knew what human factors was. The amount of times where people say, oh, what are you doing? And you say human factors and blah, blah, blah, and they go, human factors, and you try and describe it and they look at you like, no, I don't know what you mean. So I just love that. I think that's the beauty of in person conferences, isn't it, that you're just taking in information from everywhere and you're having like a two minute chat with somebody or a five minute chat with someone in the bar over lunch. And I think it's just that kind of learning almost how much is going on and being surprised by that. I guess just the depth. We had this opportunity for this face to face conversation either. I had a question. I catch up during the breaks, but the big surprise for me was actually that people's faces look very different in real life, comparing to Zoom. So this is something you look after, your neutral, your network

circles. And for the last couple of years, many of us just met new people and interact with them, and suddenly you see them, you put faces to people's names, and it was just a great stuff. So I really appreciate that we could make it happen. So it was more for me about just seeing people have a good time and meeting each other again, after so long, I would never have imagined that not just in health care, but across the conference as a whole, that there was going to be that many attendees. It was really good to see. I thought it was brilliant. I think it was a very clever and nice way of sort of easing us back into sort of in person conferences, because as we said before, we came on that we're both exhausted running around for two days. But I also think with the online conferences the past couple of years, we've really learned that it opens it up to so many more people. And the past couple of years that we were purely online, we had papers from all over the world, from so many different countries and so many people tuning into the online conference. So I think it was really important this year to kind of keep that going, keep that momentum going. We've reached out to so many more people who now know what ergonomics and human rights is, thanks to the online conference. I think I was quite excited. It was a nice idea. You said the last two, I believe, have all been online, so I think they've definitely got a good thing there. It's a good way to get people everywhere involved, not just people who can chest turn up. Obviously, with Corbett, I imagine I was not the only one who couldn't go, so I thought it was quite nice, the accessibility of people just being able to pop up on screen or listen to things or join in like that, and also the reach of it as well. We had far more attendance, really, from people overseas, our big international audience that we've built up, and we really didn't want to lose that. And we also, of course, wanted to get it back to face to face as soon as we could. So I think this was probably the right time, the right time of year. We've just come out of sort of two years of really tough times and people were looking to come back to a sort of well organized, sort of lively event. It really works for me because I'm not sure that if the conference had been longer than two days, two or three days, that I could have taken that much out of my studies. So it's quite nice. I can kind of like drop in and out of it amongst deadlines and stuff like that. Another one of my highlights really is just seeing how much effort people put into their own presentations. I did get to see some of the keynote speakers and seeing how human practices involved in things like exoskeletons and also how we choose to get from one place to another on the tube. That was really interesting. So I think that was most surprising. It's just seeing how widespread human factors is. But the scope of the conference itself was surprising to me, seeing so many different presentations on just about anything you could imagine. There was one on ship building and I believe straightening pipes. It's not really something which I'm interested in, but the fact that there was something out there for that too I thought was very interesting. And one thing that did strike me actually this year was that there are a lot of young ergonomics coming in producing some really excellent stuff. I enjoyed the technical sessions, mostly related to the consideration of applied practices. I attended a few lectures, few sessions for healthcare skills are fully transferable between industrial domains. I really like sessions related to the methodologies. This is something that I really like to emphasize in my daily work. So you definitely can learn how applying certain those design principles methodologies we know for so long that to ensure that the applications of technology those systems regardless of the context, much as human needs, capacities and limitations, not the other way around. So it was just a pleasure. But I think the sort of mix of lectures that we have and the mix of presentations and just trying to come up with different formats sometimes to keep it fresh for people. But I think this conference in particular was just somewhere that people wanted to meet and that's what we tried to do. It was really fun. I think it went really fast and I think it's because we were kind of on feet all day running around. I have to say big thank you and big kudos to the organization team because they did an incredible job. It was my first event live event for probably most of us for a long time and they really pulled this out to the level that was beyond my expectations. My head is buzzing with thoughts and ideas from my research and future ideas and where I want to go as well. As I said before, I think the main kind of thing I learned is how important it is to tell everybody about human factors. Yeah, I think that sums it up really. That's it for today. Everyone. Let us know what you think of our coverage. You can hang out with us on our discord or get to us on any of our social channels. You can always visit our official website. Sign up for our newsletter. Stay up to date with all the latest human factors news. If you like what you hear you want to support the show, you can leave us a five star review wherever you're listening. If you like Barry's recap of the conference, you can always tell your friends about us or the conference, get them involved. Or if you have the financial means to do so, please consider supporting us on Patreon. As always, links to all of our socials and our website are in the description of this episode special thank you to everyone who called in for their contributions and being on the show today. We've provided a few links in the description of this episode so you can find out more information about the conference. Speaking of which, Barry, where can our listeners go? Find out more about EHF so you can find out more about the ergonomics and humanfactorsconference@ergonomics.org UK and where can I listen to find you and you can find me on across all socials but also specifically on Twitter basil K all go on this device podcast at twelve two Podcast.com. As for me, I've been your host Nick Rome you can find me across social media at Nick Rome Barry, you know the drill. I certainly do. It depends human Factors cast brings you the best in human factors news interviews, conference coverage and overall fun conversations into each and every episode we produce. But we can't do it without you. The human factors cast network is 100% listenersupported. All the funds that go into running the show come from our listeners. Our patrons are our priority and we want to ensure we're giving back to you for supporting us. Pledges start at just $1 per month and include rewards like access to our weekly Q and A's with the hosts personalized professional reviews and Human Factors minute a Patreon only weekly podcast where the hosts break down unique, obscure and interesting human factors topics in just 1 minute Patreon rewards are always evolving so stop by Patreon.com humanfactorscast to see what support level may be right for you. Thank you and remember it depends.