‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak?’: systemic unknown-knowns for ergonomics in India

Abstract

While the worldwide ergonomics community increases its sophistication in solving global problems, specific systemic challenges still plague Indians in urban mega-cities such as Mumbai. This paper aims to highlight the gaps using the knowns-unknowns framework, which exists in the Indian ergonomics community’s capability to address such systemic challenges. Within this framework, the epistemological category of ‘unknown-knowns’ is explicated further using a case study of urban accidental deaths and injuries in Mumbai, India. These systemic casualties are essential to note because they are not only hidden from public awareness but can be avoided by proper ergonomics interventions. The article concludes with four main directions for the Indian ergonomics community in solving systemic problems in terms of, (a) capacity-building, (b) advocacy; (c) developing all realms of ergonomics with particular emphasis on complex systems; (d) developing India-centric pathways for ergonomics as a discipline.

Practitioner’s summary: This paper aims to highlight gaps in the academic Indian ergonomics community’s capacity to solve public systemic problems. An India-centric way forward for awareness, engagement, and academic capacity building is suggested to develop a comprehensive national ergonomics mission.

Keywords:

• Ergonomics
• knowns-unknowns
• institutionalisation
• human factors
• India

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that have helped create a more streamlined argument. I would also like to thank Dr. Sanjram P. Khanganba for his camaraderie and support for making Human Factors prominent in India. Further, thanks to Jaanhavi SP for her help in creating Table 1 and John Paul Kujur for his help in structuring the graphs to make them presentable for the paper. I would also like to thank Avyay Kashyap and Vyom Kushwaha for their work on the project: ‘Accidents in Mumbai, 2014–2018’ (https://homepages.iitb.ac.in/∼vivek.kant/indian-disasters/about.html). The project ‘Accidents in Mumbai, 2014–2018’ was conceptualized by Vivek Kant. The data collection and initial ideations were done by Vyom Kushwaha, as a part of his Design Research Seminar project in 2019 under the guidance of Vivek Kant, and he helped create the initial data set. The data set was taken up further as a part of the project by Vivek Kant and Avyay Kashyap, as part of his paid assistantship, and resulted in the web exhibit (‘Accidents in Mumbai, 2014–2018’), which is available at the following link and should be cited as the following:

Kant, V., and A. Kashyap. 2021. “Accidents in Mumbai 2014-2018.” HFSS Studios. Unpublished Web-Exhibit. https://homepages.iitb.ac.in/∼vivek.kant/indian-disasters/mumbai/.

The data for the web exhibit is available at the following link and should be cited as the following:

Kant, V., V. Kushwaha, and A. Kashyap. 2021. “Accidents in Mumbai 2014-2018.” HFSS Studios. Unpublished data set. https://homepages.iitb.ac.in/∼vivek.kant/indian-disasters/mumbai/datasheet.xlsx

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data file for Table 1 can be downloaded at the following link: https://homepages.iitb.ac.in/∼vivek.kant/indian-disasters/mumbai/Table1_sup.xlsx.

Notes

1 “Ergonomics” as a term is more popular and identifiable in India. Therefore, ergonomics will be used throughout for ease of use.

2 I can only speculate that this lack of institutionalization may be due to a few issues: 1) There is currently a lack of ergonomics leadership (at a professor-grade level), in any of the prominent universities, that is willing to develop the discipline at a national level. This requires community-building, negotiating, wrangling and showing value of systemic ergonomics and ergonomics thinking, in general. 2) The ergonomics connection that is currently existing in engineering departments value a particular form of engineering-based quantitative viewpoint of ergonomics, at the expense of more qualitative approaches. This results, in a very limited viewpoint of measurable outcomes at the expense of a total human experiential outcome 3) There is a sharp disconnect between academic ergonomics and its emphasis on academic research output at the expense of ergonomics integration in practice. 4) The extremely fractured higher educational system in India, limits highly interdisciplinary fields like ergonomics to exist. In order to develop such a discipline will require adequate human capital, training and vision, and as point 1 highlights, leadership and showing value of ergonomics thinking. 5) Most of the tertiary and vocational education in India is highly geared towards immediate jobs; as a result, along with ergonomics programs, there is a need for an ergonomics job sector which formally requires what a discipline such as ergonomics can offer. In short, the development of educational programs will require concerted effort and can only develop, if the ergonomics community and its non-existent leaders are willing to take up the challenge of development and sustaining the discipline above and beyond physical/physiological ergonomics. In addition, there should be added emphasis and willingness to scale-up and train a sizeable workforce of practitioners that can deliver value to the country.

3 The dataset for the web-exhibit is available as a downloadable file by Kant, Kushwaha and Kashyap (2021): https://homepages.iitb.ac.in/∼vivek.kant/indian-disasters/mumbai/datasheet.xlsx

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay [Spons/ID/10001742‐2/2018].