Rachel Birnbaum (now Benedyk)

Date of MSc: 1974/1975
Project Title:      

“A Quantitative Evaluation of Microclimate Air Exchange in Protective Clothing Assemblies”, supervised by Geoff Crockford, and hosted by the Institute of Occupational Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Pre-MSc Background: BSc (Hons), Biology, Queen Mary College, University of London. Gap year industrial experience in product quality control.
Pre-MSc Ergonomics:

I had never heard of Ergonomics until the last year of my undergraduate studies.  I had no good direction to my career until then, and studied Biology at uni simply because it was my best A level subject.  My enthusiasm for Biology gradually faded, as we spent time meticulously drawing shark skulls, and learning the taxonomy for fungi.  I was briefly fired up by an introduction to Ecology and the idea of animal populations and environments, and my reading in that area started to creep towards Anthropology.  I realised I was very interested in people.  Alas, the university tutors latched on to this as an opening to medicine or similar as a career, but I couldn’t bear the idea of dealing with sick people, I wanted to study human behaviour.  A chance discussion with a PhD demonstrator steered me towards Psychology as the answer.  QMC didn’t teach Psychology, but thanks to the University of London umbrella organisation, I was able to take a course unit in Psychology at the sister College of LSE along the road.  That Psychology course changed my life.  It was just a basic introduction, but I was more interested in it than in any of the Biology teaching.  At the end, the Psychology tutor suggested I might like to further my interest through a Masters degree, and rifling through the list he proffered, I saw an advert for the MSc in Ergonomics. I remember clearly what jumped out at me about that advert, the description talked about humans in their environment, and design to enhance their safety, well being and efficiency, especially at work; it seemed to combine my interests in people, my work experience in industry (during my gap year) and my hobbies of craft and design.  I told myself, if I ever got bored with it, I would look for another direction; I haven’t yet got bored, forty something years later!

I wasn’t sure I could get a place on the MSc course, so I half-heartedly applied for teacher training courses at the same time.  I remember dreading that I would end up training as a biology schoolteacher, and I’m glad I didn’t do it because I would have been a very poor one.  I don’t have the patience to teach young people; the teaching I have ended up doing, to mature and motivated adults, gives me back as much as I give them.  It is a completely different ball-game.

I was very lucky to be awarded one of the few grants for MSc students sponsored by the MRC.  I had no money at all to pay the fees at the time, and I would have had to defer my place without the grant. There were only 10 students in our group, and we had no base to call home; the Ergonomics Unit consisted at the time of a single large office room in the Engineering block at UCL, in which Harry Maule the Director and his wife Gunvor, who acted as his Secretary, worked.  They were warmly welcoming, and wonderfully hospitable (especially good memories of the great summer party up in their house on Box Hill!) but we had to be very self-reliant during the course.  Every teaching session was held in a different venue, often in a different college, in a different part of London.  Harry, and Joe Weiner his colleague, had gathered anyone in the University of London who empathised with the inter-disciplinary ergonomic approach, and they all contributed to the teaching.  It was rather haphazard, and even chaotic, but they all shared with us the feeling we were building something new and impressive and we had to hold it all together.  It was, I believe, the first inter-collegiate inter-disciplinary masters degree in the University of London, and it broke new ground.

We were taught Occupational Psychology by Alec Rodgers and Pat Shipley at Birkbeck; Physiology by Rainer Goldsmith at Chelsea; Biomechanics by Don Grieve at RFHSM; Systems by David Broome at UCL Engineering; Statistics by staff at the LSHTM; Psychology by Arthur Summerfield at Birkbeck; Instrumentation by Heinz Woolf at the MRC; and through it all, Harry arranged for invaluable guest lecturers and industrial visits that provided illustrations of problems and case studies and applied research to direct us to solutions. We also had immense fun; I remember driving a reverse-vision jeep at the RAE; steering a nautical bridge simulator (based on early analogue computers); crawling in a two foot seam down a coal mine; being shocked by men working at a giant furnace in a steelworks; driving a tube train on the Victoria Line; trekking miles round the car production assembly line at Fords; and being horrified at the production process at Walls sausages. Oddly, there was at that time no teaching on the course labelled “ergonomics” as such.  We soaked it all up and at some point it just clicked and we were smitten with an “ergonomic eye” (from which no one ever recovers).

One of the guest lecturers was Geoff Crockford, who researched the hazardous aspects of protective clothing.  I enjoyed his teaching and approached him as a host for my MSc Project (in those days you had to fend for yourself to find a project!) and he carved out a section of his upcoming research programme on trawlermen’s clothing, for my project. Through this I got my first job post-MSc, as his RA on that research programme.  It was a formative experience. I had to deal with trawlermen as the user group, meeting them on the dockside when they came back from a fishing trip, and getting ragged by the local popular press as the “girl who is measuring our lads’ bodies,” when I set up an anthropometric survey. I had to learn to cope, and quickly!  The research was well received – I presented it at my first Ergonomics Society Conference, in Aston in 1977- and a paper in Applied Ergonomics Journal followed.  And my MSc Project was awarded the Alf Uberg Award for that year.  I look now at the photo I have of the young me, receiving the award from Prof Brian Shackel who was the ES Chair of Council then, and I recognise my building enthusiasm for ergonomics and my certainty that this was where I belonged.
Post-MSc Ergonomics:

Like most RA’s employed at university, I was expected to do some teaching, which at the Institute of Occupational Health meant teaching Ergonomics to the Masters students in Occupational Hygiene and Occupational Medicine. This was a real eye-opener for me, to meet doctors and engineers who were trying to prevent injury and illness in the workplace, and to help them recognise the value of an applied ergonomic approach. This was hugely rewarding work.  I discovered the excitement of teaching in an interactive manner, of engaging students with real-world problems, and of relating ergonomics to other disciplines.  I expanded and continued my teaching from that point on, contributing occasional teaching in ergonomics to several industrial design schools, to other masters in health and para-medical training, and to undergraduates in psychology, engineering and architecture, over the subsequent several years. But the most important teaching engagement I had was an approach from the UCL Ergonomics Unit itself – would I take on the teaching of a short course in Introduction to Human Physiology, to help those students on the MSc Ergonomics who came from non-human science backgrounds?  I couldn’t resist, I dived in and tackled it with relish. It was wonderful to contribute something back to the MSc.

And so I was back in touch with Harry Maule and the Ergonomics Unit and thus I became aware that they had permission to expand, to take on a Lecturer, and Chris Peace was appointed.  Unfortunately, he very soon had to leave due to ill-health, and the position became vacant.  I couldn’t believe it when Joe Weiner himself rang me up and asked me to apply!  I was only 3 years out from the MSc myself, and when appointed I was the youngest lecturer in the Faculty.  By today’s recruitment criteria I would be badly under-qualified to hold a lectureship, but I must have said the right things at the interviews and I was full of plans to contribute value to the organisation and teaching of the MSc course, and so I became the Course Tutor.

This was only a year or two before Harry Maule’s planned retirement, and the appointment of John Long as Director.  It was a time of change, expansion of the Unit, consolidation of the MSc course and rapid developments in the field.  It was good to be a key player, but there were mentors on hand that helped and influenced me greatly:  Harry Maule himself, who believed in my contributions from the start; Paul Barber who clarified for me the place of experimental psychology in ergonomics; Ed Marshall who convinced me of the role ergonomics can play in industry; Heather Ward who partnered me in many volunteering activities for the Ergonomics Society and demonstrated business skills I needed; Tom Stewart whose contributions to applied ergonomics and the budding discipline of HCI had enormous impact on me; and of course Steve Pheasant, the erudite and enlightened ergonomist whose approach to physical ergonomics had the most influence on me.

Subsequent-to-MSc View of Ergonomics:

When I try to think back and tease out my “view” of ergonomics, then and now, I find that difficult.  I started with applying my training to problems of occupational health and safety, and that has stayed with me throughout my career, cemented further at times by learning of industrial disasters that pointed up critical roles for ergonomics (Piper Alpha, Three Mile Island, Kings Cross) and by the introduction of the “6-pack” of health and safety regulations whose ergonomic risk assessments gave us the first legislative clout for the discipline.  I became interested in accessibility issues for users when I myself became deaf. My experience teaching on industrial design courses exposed me to the endless potential for ergonomics to improve products. And having been trained in the 70’s, I have always encouraged a systems approach to the application of ergonomics to real-world problems.

I started as a “generalist” ergonomist, and aligned with that part of the MSc teaching when under John Long the course expanded to include an HF/HCI stream; and I am still a generalist, and very much an applied one. However, more and more nowadays I do not see these parts as separate from the whole.  Working for the past few years to contribute Ergonomics to HCI students, I see no benefit in compartmentalisation.  It’s all user-centred design, it all shares the same objectives. Technology and human interaction with it will always benefit from a holistic understanding of every aspect of the users, and every factor influencing them. We waste our breath debating a name for what we are; it’s what we do and when we do it that counts, and an integrated approach gets better results.

So, I’m still there, at the old Ergonomics Unit, which over the years has gone through a number of metamorphoses (some of them quite painful) and is now called the UCL Interaction Centre. I’m now the Teaching Programme Director, and I reckon over 900 students have passed through here, on their way to contribute something useful to the world. I still root for the students and I still wave the flag for Ergonomics.  It’s all been immensely rewarding, and I am really grateful that I got on the MSc course all those years ago!

1977 – Rachel receiving the Alf Uberg award from Brian Shackel

Rachel speaking at the EU and JL Au Revoir party.