12th European Annual Conference on Human Decision Making and Manual Control

June 22-24, 1993, Kassel, Germany

When planing this event, I sometimes looked back to the year 1984, when I started working in Kassel and in the field of man-machine systems. The Fourth European Annual Manual at Soesterberg in The Netherlands was the first event in this field I participated. I have seen some of the people I met there on different other conferences later, and some will also come to Kassel now.
In 1984, we were 3 scientists in our lab, got our first computer with 1 MB main memory and 120 MB disk. Our first project dealt with coal-fired power plants. During a task analysis we climbed onto the top of the boiler house of the sample plant - 40 m above the ground.
Now the Laboratory of Man-Machine Systems of the University of Kassel celebrated its 10th universary. Twelve scientists and several students, working in different projects, are sharing 8 workstations, more than 10 PCs, and Gigabytes of disk space. One of our projects deals with future air traffic management, and the scenarios used for task analyses play between 10.000 and 48.000 ft above sea level. We are not only growing, we are also rising.
But despite the growth of our discipline and the changes in technology at large, I hope we are able to preserve the atmosphere of an informal conference among friends working towards the same goal - a better adaptation of technical systems to the human.

Bernd-Burkhard Borys

Conference Chairmen
Gunnar Johannsen and Bernd-Burkhard Borys