Dr. Woods in New Scientist on “Emergency 2.0″
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008Dr. David Woods was recently quoted in the April 2008 New Scientist article “Emergency 2.0″ regarding the potential of new social media and technology in disaster response.
Citing recent C/S/E/L research presented at ISCRAM 2008, Woods reflected:
But even if you can organise user-generated information properly with this software, David Woods of Ohio State University in Columbus also points out that you need to avoid being distracted - by visual input in particular. He carried out simulations of a chemical release disaster with eight disaster’ response professionals and found that seven failed to notice information in the traditional channels -such as whiteboards which was missing in a video of the disaster being shown at the same time. “People get caught up in their virtual view, they start to think that it’s really what’s happening on the ground,” Woods says.
This inappropriate reliance on the imagery data creates a false sense of awareness, at the expense of ignoring conflicting data from other modalities. Such an effect is a classic pattern of poor representation design in user-interfaces, the keyhole effect. A noted a similar pattern, given the UAV nature of delivery, is what Dr. Phil Smith has previously referred to as “the video game effect”.
