Flight Safety produces a set of "design principles" for a human-machine interface, shows the A320 throttle system does not conform, and condemns it.
As any human-machine-interface specialist will tell you, that is easy to do. Any graduate student in human-machine interfaces can come up with a set of design principles which look plausible until you confront them seriously. What is hard to do is to come up with a set of principles with which many or most experienced human-machine interface specialists agree, which most designs accepted intuitively as "good" more or less fit.
Does the "Dutch design engineer" who devised these principles have a name?
I might suggest that all design principles which require that the interface be modeless
* assume that the state space of the control system is quite small;
* will thereby condemn most control systems to be found in the cockpits of the latest generation of commercial airplanes
The technical reason there are "modes" in the control systems is that a flat state space is simply too large and one needs to structure it hierarchically for any human being to be able to operate it.
PBL