Abstract

These Proceedings contain over ninety per cent of the contributions accepted for presentation at the 9th I.E.A. Congress. Each contributor was requested to submit a three-page, camera-ready, 'short paper' on their presentation, thus providing more information than is usually contained in the traditional publication of brief abstracts of I.E.A. Congress papers, without overloading you, the reader, or producing a wildly expensive set of volumes. The complete Proceedings are in two parts. Part One comprises a special issue of the journal Ergonomics, which contains Plenary Addresses on the major Congress themes by invited speakers. Part Two contains the 'short papers'. These summarise, in an equivalent format, work presented as posters, research papers, case studies, or round-table discussions. Their layout, as shown by the Table of Contents, follows that of the Provisional Congress Programme. There are four main sections, reflecting the four 'meetings' days of the Congress. Each section begins with a set of `short papers' on the poster presentations, folIowed by three 'periods' each containing six parallel sessions. Each session has been given a title which aims to describe as closely as possible the area of interest covered by its papers. Since this was done at the Abstract stage of paper submissions, our titles will vary in aptness! However, they certainly reflect the tremendous range of topics covered by our Congress speakers. Both parts of the Proceedings contain complete author and subject indexes. Apart from helping you to find your way around the 350 or so papers, these indexes provide an invaluable guide to who is doing what in the world of ergonomics as we enter the second half of the 1980s. We hope you will find the contents interesting, educational, and a valuable source of reference for many years to come. aus dem Vorwort