MIL-STD-1472G Department of Defense Design Criteria Standard Human Engineering 11 January 2012

Book Synopsis: Printed on high quality paper, and durably bound, this standard is approved for use by all Departments and Agencies of the Department of Defense. This standard establishes general human engineering criteria for design and development of military systems, equipment, and facilities. Human engineering is one of seven domains of Human-systems integration (as defined in the DoD 5000 series) and is synonymous with Human factors engineering. The purpose of this standard is to present human engineering design criteria, principles, and practices to be applied in the design of systems, equipment, and facilities so as to:

• Achieve required performance by operator, control, and maintenance personnel.
• Achieve required manpower readiness for system performance.
• Achieve required reliability of personnel-equipment combinations.
• Foster design standardization within and among systems.

This standard does not alter requirements for system development participation of human engineering specialists to interpret and implement these practices and to provide solutions to human engineering problems which arise and which are not specifically covered herein. Requirements herein are expressed in the International System of Units (SI). As a convenience, the metric units are accompanied by their approximate customary system equivalents (in parentheses). Angular measure is expressed in degrees unless it is necessary to specify fractions of a degree where milliradians are used.

MIL-STD-1472 has not had a thorough technical review since the late 1980s. MIL-STD-1472D was promulgated in March 1989, and hence addressed the level of technology that existed through 1988 or possibly 1987. The “E” revision, promulgated in 1996, was mostly cosmetic; the text was changed to a non-proportional font in order to reduce white space. The “F” revision, promulgated in 1999, consisted mainly of moving the anthropometric data from MIL-STD-1472 to MIL-HDBK-759, but little else. As a result, requirements and design criteria contained in previous versions of MIL-STD-1472 may no longer be applicable to today’s technology. The operational benefits of emerging technologies may be limited due to the out-of-date design criteria. Tomorrow’s systems will depend on greater cognitive processing on the part of the human operator, maintainer, and support personnel. Portable or wearable computers are likely to be commonplace. New display concepts such as virtual reality, haptic (touch sensing), and three-dimensional are receiving a great deal of interest, as are voice, pointing, gesture, and eye-blink control systems. Technology, if misapplied, will impose human performance requirements that cannot be satisfied. Many technologies are evolving rapidly; the human is not. The benefits of new technologies may not be realized if one fails to consider human capabilities and limitations.

The changes made in the “G” revision over the previous version are substantial. The organizational structure of the standard was revamped to group similar material in the same section of the document. Obsolete provisions (e.g., reference to dot-matrix printers) were deleted, out-of-date provisions were updated to reflect the latest research, and new provisions were added to address emerging technologies. See 6.4 for a summary of changes to the present “G” revision.