Community Ergonomics: A Theoretical Model for Rebuilding the Inner City

Abstract

There is a critical need for various forces that are working to improve the inner city to coordinate their efforts and to develop cooperative approaches. This includes governments at all levels, social agencies, educational systems, the business community, financial institutions, religious groups, ethnic groups, police, universities and inner-city residents. The diversity in values, approaches, goals, desires and legal requirements makes such a systematic integration very complex and difficult. Several human factors and ergonomics theories for the management and control of complex systems can provide insight into effective means to address these issues. General principles can be established to promote “community ergonomics.”

Self-Globalization: Strategies in HF/E education, research, and practice

“…Community Ergonomics examines the interface between people, the sociotechnical systems in which they are situated, and institutional conditions. Similar to action or participatory research, the goal is to empower communities to design and implement their own systems and generate their own solutions that are socially valid and more likely to be successfully adopted (Smith et al, 1994).…”

Human factors, management and society

“…Such approaches are also valuable in solving inner-city problems, as shown by colleagues 'inventing' community ergonomics (Smith et al 1994).…”

Integrating community ergonomics with educational ergonomics – designing community systems to support classroom learning

“…I use the term community ergonomics to refer both to the collective set of system design factors that define the socioeconomics of a community, as well as to the study of these factors [65].…”

“…These considerations lead to the key conclusion of this paper regarding the interaction of learning performance and community design, which is that the aims and objectives of educational ergonomics and community ergonomics are intimately coupled. The primary aim of community ergonomics is to improve socioeconomic conditions in communities through application of principles and methods of ergonomic systems engineering directed at improving community socioeconomic design characteristics [65,[73][74][75]. Community ergonomic interventions that yield improved quality in community socioeconomic conditions therefore also should yield improved learning performance in community schools.…”

“…What specific socioeconomic design factors in a community tend to either nurture, or undermine, learning performance of students who attend schools in that community? M.J. Smith et al [65] point out that high parental involvement in schools and formation of school-community alliances are linked to good educational performance, whereas low socioeconomic and educational status of parents and poor nutrition of children are linked to poor performance. Evidence pointing to an inverse relationship between nutritional sufficiency and student academic performance is aligned with the inverse relationship between Twin City school district poverty indices and 8 th grade test score performance.…”