Designing Displays Under Ecological Interface Design: Towards Operationalizing Semantic Mapping

Abstract

In recent years, there has been growing interest in Ecological Interface Design (EID), which is the end product of cognitive work analysis (CWA). Even though the process of CWA has been thoroughly explained in Rasmussen, Pejtersen, and Goodstein (1994), there are few detailed examples on how one performs the individual steps involved. This paper deals specifically with the final semantic mapping stage. To date, moving from the system equations given by the work domain to particular display geometries has required some open-ended artistry. We provide several examples of how semantic mapping can be systematically achieved, either by i) borrowing from well-established theoretical depictions of a phenomenon, ii) adapting preexisting displays to fit a particular need, or iii) inventing visual forms by finding a spatial representation for the underlying state equations.

Integrated System Design: Promoting the Capacity of Sociotechnical Systems for Adaptation through Extensions of Cognitive Work Analysis

“…Considerable empirical evidence exists for the value of CWA for design, specifically in relation to ecological interface design, a framework that utilizes CWA as a basis for designing interfaces for workers in complex sociotechnical systems (Rasmussen and Vicente, 1989 ; Vicente and Rasmussen, 1990 , 1992 ). For example, as documented in existing reviews (Vicente, 2002 ; Naikar, 2012 ), controlled experiments have demonstrated the value of ecological interface design for process control (Christoffersen et al, 1996 ; Pawlak and Vicente, 1996 ; Reising and Sanderson, 1998 , 2000a , b ; Ham and Yoon, 2001 ; Jamieson, 2007 ; Lau et al, 2008 ), information retrieval (Xu et al, 1999 ), neonatal intensive care (Sharp and Helmicki, 1998 ), network management (Burns et al, 2003 ), aviation (Borst et al, 2006 ), and military command, and control (Bennett et al, 2008 ). Collectively, the results of these studies demonstrate that ecological interface design can be applied to a range of systems and that, for those systems, this framework can uncover novel information requirements that can lead to better performance by workers in comparison with that obtained with existing interfaces.…”

Cognitive engineering

“…There are examples of the implementation of EID leading to improved performance over previously state‐of‐the‐art methods in sociotechnical systems 48,49. These improvements tend to be limited to tasks of a more complex nature, although there are no losses in performance following its application to simpler tasks too 44.…”

Ecological Interface Design for Anaesthesia Monitoring

“…EID is an approach to interface design that is based in Rasmussen's Cognitive Work Analysis (Rasmussen, Pejtersen, & Goodstein, 1994;Vicente & Rasmussen, 1992;Reising & Sanderson, 1998). The goal of EID is to engineer an information "ecology" around the human operator that is as easy to understand and as simple to control as the natural ecology in which we have evolved.…”