The search for relevance in applied research : introductory paper. Paper presented at the Symposium held in Amsterdam, September 1969, sponsored by the International Ergonomics Association.

Al though the terms, human factors engineering and ergonomics look and sound worlds apart, the fields they represent are more nearly alike than they are different. In his introduction to this conference the author states that the conference must be interested in studying man primarily so that better man-machine systems can be designed and better evaluated how these systems perform. With some examples he gives a comparison of the two headlines of the conference.