Bomarc,
Engineering psychologists are 30 years along this road already. My post 728 referenced Billings's notion of "human-centered automation". His book Aviation Automation, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, is a standard reference. Major manufacturers have been using such expertise for many years now. Billings's colleague David Woods, for example, is author of a canonical series of articles on human interaction with the A320 interface. The International Journal of Aviation Psychology as well as the proceedings of the conference series International Workshop on Aviation Psychology are also standard references.
PBL