Cognitive Ergonomics and Systemic Design

Operational decision making in complex environments has been the object of a wide range of studies and research projects, almost all of them focusing on the adaptation of the human component to the technological component, without it having been possible to establish a definitive and coherent standard of safe and effective operational integration of the human and technological components in such environments. In this paper, I refer to the Air Traffic Control operational environment (Sampaio José João, 2009) to discuss the high degree of vulnerability of such an approach to human/machine integration, as it presumes that it is possible to model human nature, in spite of the human element being the most complex dimension in a complex work system and, as such, not breakable down into subsystems or models, regardless of their degree of elaboration