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plants, was designed largely without the benefit of human engineering. After the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission belatedly realized that there had been a dearth of human engineering psychologists on the staffs of firms that designed and built America’s nuclear plants. That may have been why the operator-machine system at Three Mile Island had serious flaws. The indicator that should have warned operators of a stuck valve in the automatic shutdown system was not designed to call attention to itself; almost 30 percent of the system displays were too high to be read by operators; colors that signified normal conditions on some control panels signified a problem on others. As a result of these findings, the NRC hired about thirty psychologists and, heeding their recommendations, issued new regulations and guidelines for the nation’s nuclear plants.16

A few other typical findings by specialists in human engineering:

—Equipment users can read data faster and with far fewer errors from analog displays such as the hands of a watch or an aircraft altimeter than from digital displays with numbers appearing in a control panel window.

—They comprehend bar graphs, pie charts, and other visual displays more readily than alphanumeric displays.

—They can grasp at a glance the information and relationships of several kinds of data that must be read simultaneously if the data are presented on a monitor as a single symbolic shape, like a polygon with sides of varying length. —Finally, a surprising recent finding: Attractive things are easier to use—and work better—than ugly things. In a study by two Japanese researchers and another by an Israeli, people found ATMs with attractive layouts easier to use than ATMs with unattractive layouts, even though the screens, the number of buttons, and how they operated were identical.17 “These and related findings,” says Donald Norman, “suggest the role of aesthetics in product design: Attractive things make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively. How does that make something easier to use? Simple, by making it easier for people to find solutions to the problems they encounter.”18

Environmental psychology: This latter-day specialty deals with the ways in which human beings use and are influenced by their physical environment. Three examples:

Territoriality: Like most animals, human beings have a strong impulse to control the space around them. When a group of people feel that a certain area belongs to them collectively, they tend to act together and on one another’s behalf rather than as isolated individuals. In 1972 Oscar Newman, a noted urban planner, analyzed patterns of crime in public housing projects and identified the placement of buildings—what views they opened onto, what spaces they half-enclosed or commanded, and so on—that instilled in their inhabitants feelings of community and responsibility, and were thereby associated with lower crime rates.19 Since then, a number of environmental psychologists and architects have amplified the study of what kinds of neighborhood layouts foster collective territoriality and mutuality.20

Privacy: In different societies and different parts of our own society, people have dissimilar needs for privacy, but in general some degree of privacy is important to nearly everyone. The environmental psychologist tries to meet this need architecturally. In large offices, for instance, the use of partitions or walls providing freedom from direct visibility by supervisors, rather than open-plan design, has been found to yield greater job satisfaction and better, not worse, performance.21

Crowding: Living and working where the density of human beings is constantly high is stressful. When density cannot be lowered, environmental psychologists offset its effects by architectural and visual manipulation. One team of environmental psychologists tested three minor architectural variations within a college dormitory to see how much they differed in creating the feeling of crowding.