Alphonse Chapanis

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The American Alphonse Chapanis (1917-2002) was one of the founders of ergonomics, or human factors, the science of making design account for human characteristics. He was active in improving aviation safety around the time of World War II.

One of his major contributions was shape coding, where he solved the problem of a certain airplane's controls being confused with each other, due partly to them being next to each other. One manifestation of this confusion involved controls for flaps and the landing gear; the consequences of operating the wrong one were severe. After Chapanis proposed attaching a wheel to the landing gear control and a triangle to the flaps, there were no more instances of the landing gear being raised while the plane was on the ground.