The severe balance of payments crisis of 1947 threatened the Labour administration's ability to fund the totality of its post-war reconstruction programmes. The government's solution was to call for an increase in individual and collective industrial productivity to boost exports and increase income. One of their initiatives was the launch of an industrial human science research programme. The expectation was that this would yield information and techniques which would increase human efficiency and, hence, productivity, on the shop floor and in management. The human science research programme, which comprised both ergonomics and human relations studies, was of low financial value and produced knowledge and techniques that were capable of supporting an array of non-human science technologies. This thesis examines the derivation and management of the human science research programme and how this contributed to the emergence, growth and shaping of ergonomics, the study of the worker in their working environment. By tracing the development and growth of the human science research programme, I show how the learned society for ergonomics, the Ergonomics Research Society (ERS), played a marginal role in promoting the science. Instead, it was the actions of engineers in academia, and organisations such as the Department of Science and Industrial Research (DSIR), Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC), that were responsible for the institutionalisation and professionalisation of ergonomics in the middle years of the twentieth century. This study also throws new light on the management of a low-value research programme during this period by showing how the level of responsibility was delegated down from central government to committees which comprised academics, industrialists and union officials only. I argue that this resulted in a flexible and agile research programme which addressed important issues of productivity and shaped the science of ergonomics.

This project is an exploration, through art making processes, of a relationship between the interpretation of symbols and the interpretation of everyday life experiences, with a view to evolving a metaphorical visual language that might translate these experiences. Individuation is a process within Jungian psychology that relates the interpretation of symbols to the interpretation of life experiences and places their common meanings within a definitive framework of individual human development. The archetypal pattern that this framework outlines is the development of a healthy relationship between an individual’s consciousness and the unconscious. The word metaphor originates from Greek metapherein – “to carry over, transfer; meta` beyond, over + fe`rein to bring, bear. It is the transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation… the statement “that man is a fox,” is a metaphor” (Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 2008) Due to its particular relationship to time, space, memory and light photography has proven to be an ideal way to engage, record, and present this exploration. Our personal photographs operate as visual metaphors for our personal experience, we transfer the experience into the photograph, we consider the photograph is that moment in time, that place, that experience, rather than being like that experience. The interpretation of personal photographs is entirely individual and emotional. When photographs are placed into the public arena their emotional value changes, their interpretation, purpose, and authenticity can become questionable. In this project the experience and the photographs are placed within the context of individuation, which is a model that guides the interpretation of the photographs and include the individual and emotional values as a necessary part of that interpretation. In this project the symbols and visual metaphors interpreted in the photographs operate as a narrative of the personal experience of the archetypal journey of individuation.

This project is an exploration, through art making processes, of a relationship between the interpretation of symbols and the interpretation of everyday life experiences, with a view to evolving a metaphorical visual language that might translate these experiences. Individuation is a process within Jungian psychology that relates the interpretation of symbols to the interpretation of life experiences and places their common meanings within a definitive framework of individual human development. The archetypal pattern that this framework outlines is the development of a healthy relationship between an individual’s consciousness and the unconscious. The word metaphor originates from Greek metapherein – “to carry over, transfer; meta` beyond, over + fe`rein to bring, bear. It is the transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation… the statement “that man is a fox,” is a metaphor” (Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 2008) Due to its particular relationship to time, space, memory and light photography has proven to be an ideal way to engage, record, and present this exploration. Our personal photographs operate as visual metaphors for our personal experience, we transfer the experience into the photograph, we consider the photograph is that moment in time, that place, that experience, rather than being like that experience. The interpretation of personal photographs is entirely individual and emotional. When photographs are placed into the public arena their emotional value changes, their interpretation, purpose, and authenticity can become questionable. In this project the experience and the photographs are placed within the context of individuation, which is a model that guides the interpretation of the photographs and include the individual and emotional values as a necessary part of that interpretation. In this project the symbols and visual metaphors interpreted in the photographs operate as a narrative of the personal experience of the archetypal journey of individuation.