David D. Woods

Dr. 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:

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”.

Why does design get trapped producing inadvertent, cumulative complexity in use?

A new project by D. S. Lee, D. Woods, D. Kidwell and H. Tran

overview of fitness management pdf

An integration of methods from Cognitive Systems Engineering and Design Innovation to support how design finds promising directions. The integration, or de:cycle, coordinates three roles (and associated processes and artifacts produced through these design processes): practitioner, how they adapt to complexity, innovator how they envision what would be useful, and technologists, how they bring the anticipated change into the world of practice.
Norhtwest passage in Design pdf

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

Cognitive engineers face the same challenges in designing systems that users confront in working the tasks that the systems are intended to aid. A guide to overcome reductive biases in design. CTW00 pdf

A study of how a concept for representing order of magnitude aids comprhension of the decibel scale. decibel scale pdf

Principles for representation design to escape from data overload derived from material in the course and book in preparation, “Escape from Data Overload.”

Overview of the basic theory of representation: Meaning in Data pdf
Techniques for pattern representations: Pattern Views pdf
Techniques for workspace coordination: Workspace Coordination pdf
Supporting Event Recognition: forthcoming

Series of animations that illustrate principles of correspondence around Apollo 13 events (also see Where’s Waldo Apollo 13 example pdf)

“Message Overload from the Inbox to Intelligence Analysis: How Spam and Blogs Point to New Tools,” David Tinapple and David Woods; to appear in the Proceeding of the Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, October, 2003.
message overload pdf

Conference paper on an interactive representation of order of magnitude. concept pdf See a demonstration in terms of the richter scale richter scale squidgy mov

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 htmlbrand cialis

To see the approach in action on the topic of human-robot-interaction see the paper: Human-Robot Coordination pdf