Human Factors & Going Green: Study Abroad on Sustainability and Transportation

The Northern European countries have been leaders in sustainability efforts, and support of alternative modes of transportation, focusing on implementation, design and strategies that make these efforts easier to adopt by the broader community. Human Factors (HF) is a discipline that studies human behavior and capabilities with the purpose of applying to the design of products, equipment and systems to maximize safety, effectiveness, and user satisfaction. Three senior faculty in the ERAU human factors department are sponsoring a summer study abroad merging sustainability and human factors. The focus of this study abroad program is on understanding Human Factors as it relates to sustainability as well as first-hand experience with alternative modes of transportation, including trains, trams, bikes, scooters, electric vehicles and others. Three classes – HF and Sustainability, HF and Transportation, and User Experience (UX) will be integrative, each dovetailing into the others. Supplementing the classroom experience will be professional tours of organizations that are known for design and implementation of sustainability (government officials in each country who design and implement sustainability efforts, Volvo etc.) as well as visits to cultural locations that have provided the foundation for the development of these efforts in each country. Locations that will be visited include Amsterdam, Netherlands; Hamburg, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark; Gothensburg, Sweden; and Oslo, Norway