"A Human Work", also known by the Japanese title "The Works of Man", is the seventh episode of the Japanese anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was created by Gainax. The episode, written by Hideaki Anno and Yoji Enokido and directed by Keiichi Sugiyama, was first broadcast on TV Tokyo on November 15, 1995. The series is set fifteen years after a worldwide cataclysm named Second Impact, and is mostly set in the futuristic, fortified city Tokyo-3. The series' protagonist is Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy who is recruited by his father Gendo to the organization Nerv to pilot a giant bio-mechanical mecha named Evangelion into combat with beings called Angels. In the episode, a rival organization of Nerv builds Jet Alone, a prototype giant robot with an onboard nuclear reactor as an alternative to the Evangelions. During the first public test of Jet Alone, it goes out of control and marches toward a nearby city with its reactor close to a meltdown. Shinji keeps the robot at bay in his Evangelion while Nerv's Major Misato Katsuragi gets inside Jet Alone and shuts down the reactor.

"A Human Work" contains quotes from Japanese and Western directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Kihachi Okamoto and Kunihiko Ikuhara, and cultural references to scientific and religious concepts, including apoptosis, the giant-impact hypothesis and the Tree of the Sephiroth. The episode's first broadcast scored a 5.9% rating of audience share on Japanese television. "A Human Work" received a divided reception; some reviewers considered it to be a filler episode for the series' plot, while others appreciated the political implications and character development. The episode has been described as a deconstruction of the mecha genre and the Jet Alone affair as a parody of the stylistic features of giant robot stories.

Commander Gendo Ikari, head of the special agency Nerv, talks via telephone to Ryoji Kaji, who tells Ikari he has answered the information requests with falsified data, and then asks if he should do something about "that other matter". Ikari boards an SSTO and talks with an unknown person who says the budget for building more Evangelion mechas has been approved. Meanwhile, young Evangelion pilot Shinji Ikari is embarrassed by his legal guardian Major Misato Katsuragi's sloppy behavior. Shinji is also briefed on the truth about Second Impact by Dr. Ritsuko Akagi, who tells him that the official story about a freak meteor-strike is a cover-up. In reality, the catastrophe was caused by the sudden awakening of an Angel in Antarctica. It is believed that the Angels' ultimate goal is to cause Third Impact, and it is hoped that Nerv can prevent this outcome by fighting the Angels with the Evangelions. Meanwhile, Misato, who is present at Shinji's briefing, is uncharacteristically quiet and deep in thought as Ritsuko speaks.

Misato and Ritsuko attend a private company's demonstration of Jet Alone, its giant, Angel-fighting robot. During the demonstration, the robot goes out of control and its reactor becomes critical. Because the radio command circuit has been broken, Misato decides to catch Jet Alone using Shinji's mecha, Eva-01, enter Jet Alone and delete its programming directly with the code "Hope". Shinji catches Jet Alone and Misato successfully boards it. The password fails to stop the reactor and Misato attempts to manually push the control rods back into the reactor. At the last moment, the rods reinsert themselves. Misato realizes the robot was never intended to melt down and that the whole situation was a result of sabotage. Later, Ritsuko and Ikari speak in his office; she explains that their plan with Jet Alone went off with no problems, other than Misato's attempted interference, and he congratulates her on a job well done. The next morning, Shinji is upset again for Misato's behavior at home, until his school friends Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida say that Misato shows him a side of her personality no one else sees because she considers him family. Shinji smiles wistfully at that thought.

Gainax studio staff decided the base plot for "A Human Work" in 1993, when it wrote a presentation document of Neon Genesis Evangelion named New Century Evangelion (tentative name) Proposal (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (仮) 企画書, Shinseiki Evangelion (kari) kikakusho), containing a first draft of the planned episodes. In Proposal document, which was published in 1994, its Japanese title was written with a comma, as "Hito no, tsukurishimono" (人の、造りしもの; litt. "A man-made thing"). Yoji Enokido and Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno wrote the script for the episode; director Anno also worked on the storyboards, while Keiichi Sugiyama served as the episode's director. Masahiko Otsuka worked as assistant director, Shunji Suzuki as chief animator and Mitsumu Wogi as assistant character designer.

For the Jet Alone dossier visible in the first scene in Gendo's office of "A Human Work", produced by the Gainax Shop, the staff recreated the original material generated with a Macintosh and modified it. Writer Virginie Nebbia likened Gendo's office to the visual style of Akio Jissoji, known as the director of various Ultraman episodes; as noted by Nebbia, Jissoji often uses shots in which the set preponderantly occupies the screen and the characters are shot from a distance. The episode also depicts real-life vehicles such as an SSTO spacecraft. and a Ferrari 328. The American Northrop YB-49 prototype jet-powered heavy bomber was initially chosen for the image of the Eva transport aircraft, but the crew later decided to use the North American XB-70 Valkyrie. In the scene in which Eva-01 jumps from the aircraft to chase the Jet Alone, the Eva would have to stumble forward in the real world, but the staff wanted the flow to be more fluid. For the scene Anno took inspiration from tokusatsu shows, including Ultraman. Writer Virginie Nebbia noticed that Misato, usually depicted in a sensual manner, wears long pajamas that cover her entire body in "Hedgehog's Dilemma", an episode which Anno basically did not write, while in "A Human Work" Misato is represented with neckline and shorts; Nebbia traced the origin of this fan service use to Anno's hand on the storyboards. The episode also contains homages to the animator Kunihiko Ikuhara, a friend of the director Anno, whose name is used for a society mentioned in the scene in which Misato and Ritsuko discuss with Shiro Tokita, and Kihachi Okamoto, of whom it takes up various directing techniques.

Koichi Yamadera, Hiro Yūki, Tetsuya Iwanaga, Tomokazu Seki and Megumi Hayashibara, voice actors of several main characters in the series, played unidentified characters for "A Human Work", including announcers and Shinji's unnamed classmates. A four-beat Jazz version of Fly Me to the Moon sung by Japanese singer Yoko Takahashi was used as the ending theme.

In the first scene Gendo is framed in his office and the Tree of the Sephiroth, a diagram of the Jewish Kabbalah, is visible on the ceiling of the room. The ceiling illustration of Commander Ikari is taken from Athanasius Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus. Slant Magazine's Micheal Peterson noted that Gendo's position at the desk "is in relation to the Godhead symbol on the tree". The office's floor also depicts a cosmological diagram by Robert Fludd. In the same scene, a text that mentions apoptosis and apobiosis, is framed. The text also mentions the molecular polarisation rate; according to the book Evangelion Glossary (エヴァンゲリオン用語事典, Evangerion Yougo Jiten) by Yahata Shoten, in molecular spectroscopic analysis the term indicates the polarisation ratio of incident light, such as laser or X-ray light, on a molecule of interest. The same book noted how the name of the Japanese language recognition code of the Jet Alone's operating system, KOZAIC7, is similar to Cosaic (こざいく), a software for creating Internet home pages. Moreover, Shiro Tokita's name comes from Ryū Murakami's novel Ai to gensō no fascism (愛と幻想のファシズム; "The Fascism of Love and Fantasy"). The episode also mentions other characters named after characters from the Murakami's novel: Witz, Manda, Yasugi, and Yoshizawa.