Unravelling future thinking: a valuable concept for prospective ergonomics

Abstract

Future thinking (FT) is the cognitive ability that enables humans to mentally imagine and pre-experience future events. Despite a sharp increase in basic research on future thinking in the last decade, we note the lack of transfer to Human Factors and Ergonomics (HF&E), although the field is increasingly concerned by future artefacts and although theory building on future-oriented HF&E has begun (e.g. prospective ergonomics). This article gives an overview of key findings regarding future thinking, namely i) underlying cognitive mechanisms, ii) functions and obstacles, iii) common descriptors of future thinking, iv) recommendations as to the possible improvement of future thinking during user research and, v) methods for the assessment of future thinking abilities. This synthesis can support HF&E practitioners in fine-tuning their future-oriented methods.

Keywords:

• Prospective ergonomics
• future thinking
• mental time travel
• future-oriented cognition
• needs anticipation

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback regarding topics to clarify (biases and relevancy of FT) and improvements to the structure of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work has been partly supported by a CIFRE funding granted to Total S.E. by ANRT on behalf of the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. This work has been partly supported by the French PIA project « Lorraine Université d’Excellence », reference ANR-15-IDEX-04-LUE. This work has been partly supported by the Vedecom Institute.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clement Colin

Clement Colin is a PhD candidate in ergonomics at Université de Lorraine. His work focuses on physical sharing experiences and shared mobility.

Antoine Martin

Antoine Martin holds a PhD in ergonomics. His work focuses on energy for housing and the anticipation of users’ needs.

Flavie Bonneviot

Flavie Bonneviot is a PhD candidate in ergonomics at Vedecom Institute and at Université de Lorraine. Her work focuses on human-robot trust during the interaction between pedestrian and automated vehicles.

Eric Brangier

Eric Brangier is a full professor in ergonomics at Université de Lorraine. Prof. Brangier’s work has resulted in 350+ papers, communications, reports, keynotes about different human-technology related issues. Some of his recent works have tackled criteria for persuasive interfaces, criteria for gamified interfaces, human-technology symbiosis, and prospective ergonomics.