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.

The impact of Enabling Collaborative Situations in AR-assisted consignment tasks

“…It seems quite conceivable that the participants do not understand the scope and implication of the improvements they have benefited from, particularly as this work situation was simulated without any real consequences and was of limited duration. The future thinking (Colin et al, 2021) could be very difficult. Therefore, there would likely be a form of threshold from which the improvement of an ECS characteristic translates into an improvement of certain criteria, such as the perception of utility or acceptability.…”