The “Human Factor” as a Special Interface. On the Scientific-Historical and Technical-Philosophical Conception of Human-Machine Interaction at the Research Institute for Anthropotechnics (1960-1980)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Kevin Liggieri
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: from 2017 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397442575

The applicant wants to investigate the “human factor” in human-machine interaction in the period from 1960 to 1980 in the German context and to do so from a research perspective of history of science and philosophy of technology. The subject of the analysis is the concept of technical-scientific “anthropotechnics” and its institutionalization in the Research Institute for Anthropotechnics (1969). In the period of time that will be examined, the changing forms of knowledge of the ‘human’ and the ‘technical’ and their new forms of interaction will be worked out based on the efficacious concept of anthropotechnics. The Research Institute can hold as exemplary for this altered epistemic view of human-machine interaction because here the European-Continental conceptions of the human as a complex ‘whole’ were combined with the Anglo-Saxon pragmatics of machine construction. In this way, a research programme on human-machine adaptation was formed that was as productive as it was influential. The task of “anthropotechnics” consisted in adapting technology to the ‘whole’ human being. Although the Institute for Anthropotechnics was dissolved in 1996, its important human-centred imperative for production and interaction is still present right up to today in different technical conditions for design. Looking more closely at the historical conception of this imperative for technical adaption to the human, anthropotechnics should not exclude but integrate the human being in dealings with technology. This meditation always concerned a technical adaptation to a determinate representation of the human and model of the human. Thus, different representations of the human (organicist, mechanical), themselves socio-culturally influenced, evoked specific engineering-scientific models of the human (anthropometric, information-technological). In the present situation of the ever-increasing digitalization of industrial production, which fundamentally changes society as well as the representation of the human, the scientific-historical task must thus be to investigate in a reflective and source based manner the development of complex industrial-technical arguments for a human-machine collaboration in its research focus. First, the scientific-historical and technical-philosophical conditions of the possibility that favoured the emergence of an “anthropotechnics” in the 1960s should be worked out. In this reappraisal, anthropological debates on the ‘whole’ human being are as much the focus of the examination as a delineation from cybernetic ideas. Second, on this basis the technical and philosophical conception of an “anthropotechnics” as well as its dissemination in technical-scientific and public space will be examined by reference to sources. Third the development of anthropotechnical research approaches and concepts in the Research Institute for “Anthropotechnics” will be investigated determinately as regards its programme, networking and impact in the 1970s and 1980s

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Host: Professor Dr. Michael Hagner