Stan Caplan
June 26, 2025
In about 1960, Kodak established the first applied Human Factors group in industry. It was the result of the collaboration of Harry Davis and Chuck Miller. Harry, an Industrial Engineer, was tasked with redesigning Kodak jobs that required potentially harmful physical labor. To better understand physical requirements, he teamed up with Chuck who was a physician in Kodak’s medical department. Together they would observe employees working in railroad coal cars using sledgehammers to loosen pieces of coal, workers doing repetitive tasks, and other questionable situations. They convinced Kodak management that a small team of people was needed to measure physical and physiological requirements of these tasks and redesign the tasks to be less demanding.
In the early 1970s, the Group began providing Human Factors support for product design in addition to workplace design and it grew into a valuable wide-reaching company function. Harry retired in mid-80’s and Kodak reorganized Human Factors into 3 distinct groups. I had been supporting the design of copiers as an individual contributor for about 10 years and now I was appointed supervisor of the group that provided usability design support to all business units that developed non-photographic products (copiers, scanners, x-ray machines, blood analysis machines, etc.). My new manager wanted me to spend 30% of my time managing and do projects 70% of my time. I saw that as a recipe for my failure and gently mentioned to him that I needed to spend more managing time. He didn’t mandate the 30%/70% split so I did it my way which was to reverse the allocation so I could spend a majority of my time focused on the people in my group and on our “clients”, the business units. Since this was my first management position, I wasn’t totally sure of myself, so I kept alert to any signs he was not happy with how I was managing the group. As it turned out, my manager never again mentioned my allocation of time, not even in performance review sessions.