Space Station

Back in the early ’80s I had this dream of working on a space station in the arena of human factors, a discipline that marries human performance and technological behaviors (see sidebar). Such a place of work would be a real Wow-Field, though I didn’t use that word at the time. For a variety of reasons, but mainly a lack of persistence on my part when a hurdle got in my way, that dream didn’t get off the launching pad as it were. A good thing too, else I would never have met my wife and we’d never have had our son (more on this kind of retrospective thinking in another entry).

But recently it has occurred to me that there is another “space station” in which I already do participate. Two space stations, actually. One is Space Station Earth, as hokey as that sounds. The other is the Space Station Net, which is being built and is evolving at breakneck speed. For me (and you) to not find Wow-Fields in these huge places on a somewhat regular basis means that we’re in ruts of our own making. As the TED Talks demonstrate, there are people who live their lives in Wow-Fields almost all the time.

Sidebar: This was told to me by one of my professors in a human factors course.

During the second World War a new fighter plane was released into the fleet. Pilots were trained to proficiency and then sent into the theater to fight the enemy. Reports started coming back that the new planes were involved in a series of crashes. Not from enemy fire, but from failure. So the new planes were grounded, and engineers were brought in to determine why the planes were failing. They detected nothing at all wrong with the planes.

Then the Air Force considered something to be systemically wrong with the pilots. Medics and psychiatrists were brought in, and found nothing wrong with the pilots. Someone then got the bright idea to look at the interaction between man and machine. This turned out to be the key to solving the puzzle. Turned out that the designers of the new planes, for perfectly good reasons, switched the controls that throttled and slowed the planes. Under normal conditions, the pilots’ trainings held, but under the stress of battle, the old habits came forward, and the pilots in the grip of momentary confusion, crashed the planes. This makes an incredible amount of sense, yes? That’s the field I wanted to participate in.