MIL-STD-1472F Department of Defense Design Criteria Standard: Human Engineering

Developed by the United States Department of Defense, the MIL-STD-1472F Department of Defense Design Criteria Standard: Human Engineering describes general human engineering criteria for the design and development of military systems, equipment, and facilities. The purpose of this standard is to define human engineering design criteria, principles, and practices to be applied in the design of systems, equipment, and facilities.

In this way, the following is achieved:

• To achieve the required performance by operator, control and maintenance personnel.
• Minimize skill and personnel requirements and training time.
• To achieve the necessary reliability of personnel-equipment combinations.
• Promote design standardization within and across systems.

The purpose of this standard is to present human engineering design criteria, principles, and practices to achieve mission success through the integration of humans into systems, subsystems, equipment, and facilities, and to ensure effectiveness, simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and safety of system operation, training, and maintenance.

This standard is applicable to the design of all systems, subsystems, equipment, and facilities except where aircraft design provisions conflict with crew system design requirements. Nothing in this standard should be construed to limit the selection of equipment, materials, or processes to the specific items described herein. Unless otherwise specified in specific provisions, this standard applies to the design of systems, subsystems, equipment, and facilities for use by both men and women. This standard is not intended as a criterion for limiting the use of field-available materials in areas such as lift repetition or temperature exposure time.

Military systems, equipment, and facilities must provide effective procedures, work patterns, and work environments that promote personnel safety and health and minimize factors that degrade human performance or increase error. Design-driven requirements for operator workload, accuracy, time constraints, mental processing, and communication must not exceed operator capabilities. The design must also minimize personnel and training requirements within the constraints of time, cost, and performance.

For standardization purposes, controls, displays, marking, coding, labeling, and layout schemes (equipment and panel layout) must be uniform for common functions across all equipment. The criterion for selecting off-the-shelf commercial or government equipment is the extent to which the equipment conforms to this standard. If off-the-shelf equipment requires modification to interface with other equipment, the modification must be designed to meet these criteria. Redesigns of off-the-shelf equipment must have the approval of the procurement activity.

The design should reflect the allocation of functions to personnel, equipment, and personnel-equipment combinations to achieve:

• Required precision, accuracy, time and security
• Required reliability of system performance
• Minimum number of personnel and skill level required to operate and maintain the system
• Required performance in a cost-effective manner
• Minimum workaround requirements

Human engineering design should reflect human engineering, life support, and biomedical factors that affect human performance. These include, where applicable:

• Satisfactory atmospheric conditions, including composition, pressure, temperature and humidity, including safeguards against uncontrolled variation beyond acceptable limits.
• Protection measures against uncontrolled variation in the range of acoustic noise, vibration, acceleration, shock, explosion and impact forces and beyond safe limits.
• Protection against thermal, toxicological, radiological, mechanical, electrical, electromagnetic, pyrotechnic, visual and other hazards.
• Sufficient space for personnel, their equipment, and the free volume for the movements and activities they are required to perform during operational and maintenance tasks under both normal and emergency conditions.
• Adequate physical, visual, auditory and other communication links between personnel and between personnel and their equipment under both normal and emergency conditions.
• Efficient arrangement of operation and maintenance workplaces, equipment, controls and indicators.
• Provisions for safe, efficient task performance under reduced and elevated gravitational forces with safeguards against injury, equipment damage, and disorientation.
• Adequate natural or artificial lighting to enable operation, inspection, training and maintenance.
• Safe and adequate passages, hatches, stairs, steps, platforms, slopes and other provisions for entry, exit and passage under normal, adverse and emergency conditions.
• Providing acceptable staff accommodations, including body support and restraint, seating, rest and nutrition, i.e. oxygen, food, water and waste management.
• Provision of non-restrictive personal life support and protective equipment.
• Provisions to minimize the psychophysiological stress effects of duty time and fatigue.
• Design features that ensure the speed, safety, ease and economy of operation and maintenance in normal, adverse and emergency maintenance environments.
• Satisfactory remote control provisions and means.
• Adequate emergency systems for emergency management, escape, survival and rescue.
• Compatibility of the design, location, and layout of controls, displays, work areas, maintenance accesses, stowage arrangements, passenger compartments, assigned tasks, and control movements with the clothing and personal equipment to be worn by personnel operating, riding, or maintaining military systems or equipment.
• The design of workstations should consider all human-machine interfaces for on-the-go operation, where applicable.

In short, the MIL-STD-1472F standard was developed to ensure that systems, equipment, and facilities are designed to optimize human performance and reduce the likelihood of human error. The goal is to provide design criteria for human factors engineering, ensuring that equipment is user-friendly, safe, and effective for military personnel. This standard covers the design of systems, equipment, and facilities that require human interaction. This includes controls, displays, work areas, lighting, security, and more.

The main areas covered by this standard are:

• Anthropometrics: Guidance for designing for differences in body size and shape within the user population.
• Controls: Designing physical and electronic controls (e.g., buttons, switches) to be intuitive and fault-tolerant.
• Displays: Criteria for visual and audio displays, ensuring readability, interpretability, and clarity.
• Workplace layout: Ergonomic guidelines for work areas, seating arrangements, and accessibility.
• Environmental factors: Recommendations for lighting, noise levels, vibration, temperature, etc.
• Staff safety and health: Minimising health and safety risks arising from physical or cognitive overload.
• Information presentation: Optimizing instructions, labels, and messages to reduce misinterpretation.
• Training and manuals: Guidance on developing effective user training and technical documentation.

Although this standard is a military standard, it is considered by many civilian industries, particularly aerospace, defense contracting, and safety-critical systems, because of its comprehensive, research-backed human factors guidance.

Our organization, which has been supporting businesses across all sectors for years through a wide range of testing, measurement, analysis, and evaluation activities, has a strong team of employees who closely follow global developments in science and technology and are constantly improving themselves. In this context, we also provide testing services to businesses in accordance with the "MIL-STD-1472F Department of Defense Design Criteria Standard: Human Engineering."