Is it really better to share? Distributed situation awareness and its implications for collaborative system design

Abstract

Despite well over two decades of academic research, situation awareness in complex collaborative environments remains ambiguous. Recent systems-based models of distributed situation awareness have attempted to address this; however, further effort is required in clarifying exactly how situation awareness operates in complex socio-technical systems. One pertinent issue regards what the 'distributed' situational picture looks like from the perspective of each component of the system and how it differs amongst team members. Is the same picture 'shared' across team members, or do they have different, but compatible, views on the situation? This article tackles this question by presenting a distributed cognition-inspired systems-based model of situation awareness in collaborative systems, along with an accompanying modelling approach, the propositional network methodology. Following this, the paper focuses explicitly on the model's sub-concept of compatible situation awareness and uses case study evidence to demonstrate how awareness is distributed between, and differs between, team members. This view is then compared to existing team situation awareness views and the implications for collaborative system design are discussed.

Collaboration And Awareness Amongst Flight Attendants

“…In highly dynamic, complex, uncertain, and risky environments, the role of situation awareness becomes pivotal. This has been seen in studies of commercial aviation (Sarter & Woods, 1992), anesthesiology (Gaba et al, 1995) and firefighting (Jiang et al, 2004), where collaborators are able to see or hear the same information, but they understand it differently (Heath & Luff, 1992;Dourish & Bellotti, 1992;Endsley et al, 2003;Salmon et al, 2010). For instance, Sarter & Woods (1992) explored the interactions between pilots and the Flight Management System (comprised of electronic flight instrument displays).…”

The role of situation awareness in accidents of large-scale technological systems

“…Compatible awareness is therefore the phenomenon that holds distributed systems together (Salmon et al, 2009). The first effort to use the DSA in improving process safety has been conducted by Nazir et al (2014c).…”

Distributed Situation Awareness in pilotage operations: Implications and Challenges

“…Salmon et al (2010) suggested that the SA is maintained in the system by the exchange of information between the agents or the transactions of SA. Teams with more transactions between members are found to perform better than teams with less transactions (Sorensen & Stanton, 2016).…”

“…Notably the notion that SA at team level is compatible in nature. Salmon et al (2010) theorize that the different team members due difference in goals, roles, schemas etc.…”