B.-T. Karsh (Ed.): Ergonomics and Health Aspects, HCII 2009, LNCS 5624, pp. 162–169, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 What Is Prospective Ergonomics? A Reflection and a Position on the Future of Ergonomics Jean-Marc Robert 1 and Eric Brangier 2 1 Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Dept. of Math & Industrial Engineering – P.O. Box 6079, Station Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec H3C 3A7 Canada 2 Université Paul Verlaine – Metz. 2LP, Laboratoire Lorrain de Psychologie. Faculté des Sciences Humaines et Arts. BP 30309. Île du Saulcy – 57006 Metz (France). jean-marc.robert@polymtl.ca, brangier@univ-metz.fr Abstract. This paper presents a reflection on the future of ergonomics and a clear position for the use of prospective in this discipline. We propose to struc- ture ergonomic activities around corrective, preventive (design) and prospective ergonomics, where the latter looks forward in time to defining human needs and activities so as to create human-centered artifacts that are useful and provide a positive user experience. The place of prospective ergonomics is upstream of projects, before a problem or request is raised by a client, and before projects exist. We describe several characteristics of prospective ergonomics and com- pare them with those of corrective and preventive ergonomics. We show that prospective ergonomics has major impacts on education and practice, since er- gonomists should not only be trained as human factor experts but also as strate- gists to reflect on the future and as project managers. Prospective ergonomics requires the “intelligence analysis” of a lot of data and experts’ opinions, as well as perspicacity, intuition, creativity, motivation and initiative. It represents a huge potential for the advancement and evolution of ergonomics and for the achievement of its full maturity. Keywords: Corrective ergonomics; Preventive ergonomics; Prospective ergo- nomics; Design; Human-centered projects. 1 Introduction In this article we present a reflection on the future of ergonomics and we take a clear position for the use of prospective in this discipline. We reconsider the classification of ergonomic activities in two large categories that are commonly mentioned by authors and that correspond to corrective and preventive ergonomics. We propose to define three categories of activities around corrective, preventive, and prospective. This exer- cise is not only academic since we believe it may have a major impact on our discipline. Above all, it allows us to emphasize a new type of activity that should be promoted in our field: the prospective. In the new classification, we continue to use corrective ergonomics whose role is clear and consistent among authors. We use preventive ergo- nomics to cover all design activities that were included so far in what authors called prospective ergonomics, and we add prospective ergonomics with a new content en- tirely related to prospective.