Erik Hollnagel, David D. Woods and Nancy Leveson (editors)
Explores groundbreaking new development in safety and risk management, where 'success' is based on the ability of organizations, groups and individuals to anticipate the changing shape of risk before failures and harm occur. Featuring contributions from many of the worlds leading figures in the fields of human factors and safety, Resilience Engineering provides provocative insights into system safety.
James Reason:
'This is the most thought-provoking collection of papers I've read in a very long time. They are written by the best in the field at the top of their form. Resilience is a notion whose time has come. We cannot realistically expect to eliminate adverse events and still stay in business. But we can strive to achieve greater robustness towards our operational hazards. This book tells us how to do it and why it's necessary.'
Teaching Cognitive Engineering?
A new resource is:
Joint Cognitive Systems: Patterns in Cognitive Systems Engineering
Abstract from JCS: Patterns...
New technologies are fascinating, we thought, because more powerful automation would overcome human limitations and make our systems ‘faster, better, cheaper’ with simple easy tasks for people. Be prepared to be surprised—what you thought you knew about new technology and more powerful automation is not what happens. Research in Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) looks at the intersection of people, technology and work. What it has found is not stories of simplification through more automation, rather it has found stories of complexity and adaptation. When work changed through new technology, the real result was practitioners now had to cope with new complexities and tighter constraints. They adapted their strategies and the artifacts to workaround difficulties and accomplish their goals as responsible agents. The surprise was that new powers had transformed work creating new roles, new decisions and new vulnerabilities. Ironically, more autonomous machines have created the requirement for more sophisticated forms of coordination across people and across people and machines to adapt to new demands and pressures.
This book synthesizes these Patterns though stories about coordination and mis-coordination, resilience and brittleness, affordance and clumsiness in a variety of settings, from a hospital intensive care unit, to a nuclear power control room, to a space shuttle control center. The stories reveal demands that make work difficult, how people at work adapt but get trapped by complexity, how people at a distance from work oversimplify the complexities and squeeze practitioners. The book tells the story of how CSE observes at intersection of people, technology and work, how CSE abstracts patterns behind the surface details and wide variations, and how CSE discovers promising new directions to help people cope with complexities. The stories of CSE show one key to well-adapted work is the ability to avoid getting stuck and to be ready to revise—being prepared to be surprised.
How do people work around complexity and exploit new capabilities in work? How do systems of people and artifacts adapt to the demands of work? What are the surprising reverberations of technology change? Cognitive Systems Engineering arose about 25 years ago to meet these challenges. This book provides the authoritative guide to the origins and basic concepts from 2 of the pioneers in the field.
Joint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering
Erik Hollnagel & David D. Woods
Contents
The Driving Forces
The Evolution Of Work
The Basics Of A Science
The Threads Of CSE
Coping With Complexity
Use Of Artifacts
Joint Cognitive Systems
Control And Cognition
CSE And Its Applications
Taylor & Francis, February 2005, 200 pp.
ISBN: 0-8493-2821-7, $99.95 / £60.99
CSE research discovers what would be useful. What has emerged from this research are a set of generic support functions that provide basic requirements to be met during system development and criteria to test for success in evaluation of joint cognitive systems. If new development is to achieve high levels of performance in cognitive work, then it must tell us how the technology will support these basic requirements:
For a brief overview of the chart: Generic Support Functions pdf
Why is recognizing event patterns amazing? A model of events/expectations event model pdf
Topic Landscape that covers fundamental patterns in cognitive work in five families including Laws of Adaptation, Models, Cooperation, Responsibility, plus Norbert's Contrast. Norbert's Contrast provides an alternative model of coordination of people and automata that supercedes the substitution myth and Fitts' List. Laws
Introduction to the laws: Cognitive Science Society Plenary pdf
Mapping the variations on human-centered design; plus a version of the un-Fitts list! Human-centered? pdf
An approach to R&D that replaces the discredited 'pipeline' model with synchronized cycles. The result is a guide for management.
"Balancing Practice-Centered Research and Design." by D.D. Woods and K. Christoffersen. In M. McNeese and M. A. Vidulich (editors), Cognitive Systems Engineering in Military Aviation Domains. Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Human Systems Information Analysis Center, 2002, p. 121-136.
The chapter is based on Woods' plenary address at the International Ergonomic Association congress in 2000, "Complementarity and Synchronization as Strategies for Practice-Centered Research and Design." Multi-media animations from this talk provide dynamic illustrations of the chapter figures (see also part 3 of a Topic Landscape on Studying Cognitive Work in Context Facilitating Insight html
To see the approach in action on the topic of human-robot-interaction see the paper: Human-Robot Coordination pdf
The envisioned world problem--
~ How does one envision or predict the relation of technology, cognition and
collaboration in a domain that is in a process of becoming?
~ How will envisioned technological change shape cognition and collaboration?
~ How will practitioners adapt artifacts, given new capabilities and new
complexities to meet their own goals?
~ How can we predict the changing nature of expertise and new forms of failure
as the workplace changes?
For description of the envisioned world problem see pages 3 to 7 of animock pdf
It is also discussed in the following paper: technology change pdf
For an animation of technology change process see: black box mov
Woods' plenary address at the International Ergonomic Association congress in 2000, "Complementarity and Synchronization as Strategies for Practice-Centered Research and Design." The talk provides a new approach to R&D that replaces the discredited 'pipeline' model with synchronized cycles. The result is a guide for management.
The content is available as a book chapter "Balancing Practice-Centered Research and Design." by D.D. Woods and K. Christoffersen. In M. McNeese and M. A. Vidulich (editors), Cognitive Systems Engineering in Military Aviation Domains. Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Human Systems Information Analysis Center, 2002, p. 121-136. (See the entry Practice-Centered Design under Foundations or Design categories for more including animations of the chapter figures.)
The approach is part of a Topic Landscape on Studying Cognitive Work in Context (section 3) Facilitating Insight
To see the approach in action on the topic of human-robot-interaction see the paper: Human-Robot Coordination pdf
Technology change transforms cognitive and collaborative work. Paper includes description of the envisioned world problem see: technology change pdf
Animation of technology change process:
The basic cognitive triad is described at Cognitive System Triad html and illustrated at Cognitive System Triad mov
Great introduction to Cognitive Engineering in a Multi-media production titled
"W3: Watching Human Factors Watch People at Work". Topics include Kubrick's Bone, Faustian bargains, and several Oversimplification Fallacies that block our ability to understand cognition at work. President's Address
Produced by D.D. Woods and D. Tinapple, it was Woods' Presidential Address at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, September 28, 1999.
The basic cognitive triad is described at Cognitive System Triad html and illustrated below:
Paper introduces thinking about designs at the 3 levels of understanding, usefulness and usability in parallel. Designs are models of the field of practice (understanding level), hypotheses about what would be useful in the future (usefulness level) and objects to be realized (usability level). Designs are hypotheses pdf
For an animation of the concept see parallel levels in design mov
The key paper from Rasmussen and Lind capturing the founding slogan of Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) as coping with complexity
Coping with Complexity pdf
The first journal paper naming the field and setting out the foundations. CSE: New Wine in New Bottles pdf (reprinted in special 30th anniversary issue of IJHCS)