What is a Topic Landscape?

The Topic Landscape organizes a large amount of evolving material based on a basic principle of information design: the navigation mechanisms should be a model of the topic being navigated. It consists of a multi-tiered organization that poses a problem and launches an exploration that takes the form of a series of challenges and responses. The advantage of this organization is that it presupposes no linear path, making it ideal for presenting information as well as developing ideas. Because the Topic Landscape is extendable, it also becomes an ideal tool for collaboration, because different sections can represent information from different contributors.

We use this tool as a method of unfolding and displaying the elements in our scenario, which revolves around the integration of emerging sensor technologies in the military urban environment. It combines the results from our CTA into a narrative to understand what's difficult and how to imagine effective solutions. The Landscape is extendable and ideal for converging multiple perspectives from different contributors.


Tools

The Topic Landscape was created first as a template using Adobe Illustrator. This allowed us to articulate all aspects of the framework using vector graphics which are scaleable and transferrable to different formats with ease. Also, this allowed us to create highly complex architectures packaged in very small file sizes. This becomes advantageous as the Topic Landscape could be used on a computer, PDA, or mobile phone and transmitted quickly via wired or wireless connections.

We created the working version of the Topic Landscape as a website. This is the most effective way to facilitate collaboration across disparate groups and to support asynchronous updating and continuous access to materials using various hardware and software configurations. Another distinct advantage of implementing the Topic Landscape as a website is the inherent nonlinearity of its design. Internet hyperlinks offer incredible freedom from the forced sequencing of printed material, and the Topic Landscape is organized such that each person can explore the sections in the order that makes sense based on their unique perspective or interests. As the Topic Landscape grows with contributions from other authors and links to other works, etc; this becomes an even greater benefit. Also, it is easy for collaborators to link to existing websites that contribute to the body of information being developed in the Landscape.

 


















  Developing the Scenario

Our Topic Landscape organizes components of a scenario-based exploration to discover what would be useful as design seeds in the MOUT domain. This includes the introduction and overview, the sequence of events, the critical episodes that punctuate the flow, the deeper structure of generic patterns in cognitive demands and coordinated activity built into the domain story, and lastly the implications that emerge from using the scenario to explore how the new technology supports the operations in question.

The basic framework involves the evacuation of American citizens from a large city in a foreign country. The story begins with the decision to conduct the evacuation, then to the increased occupation of U.S. troops, reconnaissance missions, to the evacuation itself, and finally the redeployment of troops after the evacuation is complete. This initial story framework was complemented with generic patterns of critical support and complicating factors found as results from our CTA. These elements led us to develop 4 critical episodes which illustrate the difficultues and dynamics of MOUT as they relate to incorporating new sensor technology.


Critical Episodes

The critical episodes include: sensor monitoring, checkpoints, reconnaissance missions, and the evacuation. The critical episodes are subplots of our general scenario that represent opportunities for collaborators to showcase capabilities of real sensor network implementation. They are not meant to exhaustively define the narrative, rather they represent vignettes of activity all playing out within the larger context. Depending on technology or research needs, these episodes can be reconfigured, reorganized, or edited to highlight different elements of the framework. These episodes were designed in sufficient detail to elicit reaction from both the military and sensor communities.