Supporting common ground and awareness in emergency management planning

Abstract

We present a design research project on knowledge sharing and activity awareness in distributed emergency management planning. In three experiments we studied groups using three different prototypes, respectively: a paper-prototype in a collocated work setting, a first software prototype in a distributed setting, and a second, enhanced software prototype in a distributed setting. In this series of studies we tried to better understand the processes of knowledge sharing and activity awareness in complex cooperative work by developing and investigating new tools that can support these processes. We explicate the design rationale behind each prototype and report the results of each experiment investigating it. We discuss how the results from each prototyping phase brought us closer to defining properties of a system that facilitate the sharing and awareness of both content and process knowledge. Our designs enhanced aspects of distributed group performance, in some respects beyond that of comparable face-to-face groups.

Human–agent collaboration for disaster response

“…In emergency response situations, failures in team coordination can often occur due to the complexities of such interdependencies, and such failures are widely acknowledged as the most significant factor that can cost human lives [59, p. 2]. In particular, related work studies the challenges that arise when team members aim to create a shared understanding (e.g., of what needs to be done) [14], develop situation awareness (i.e., knowledge of the environment and the actors within it) [3], and align cooperative action through on-going communication [59].…”

“…Therefore, it is necessary to optimise the coordination of teams by allocating tasks to teams in time and space efficiently and sufficiently. Given this, a number of tools and system architectures have been developed to support such team coordination [14,36,41]. However, while these approaches focus on providing tools to human teams to better share information and formulate plans, they do not consider how such team coordination could be optimised using agent-based planning.…”

Supporting Team Coordination on the Ground: Requirements from a Mixed Reality Game

“…Shared understanding, situation awareness, and alignment of cooperative action through on-going communication are key requirements to enable successful coordination. Convertino et al (2011) design and study a set of tools to support common ground and awareness in emergency management. For our game probe, we study how participants coordinate teams and perform spatially distributed, time critical tasks.…”

“…Convertino et al (2011) analyse the turn-taking structure of communication and dialog acts (speech acts) to assess how participating teams use situational awareness tools.…”

Building a Birds Eye View

“…This has not gone unnoticed by HCI and the ITS (Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces) communities as an opportunity for deploying the considerable body of research into the natural interaction practices [32,44], interaction techniques [22,36] and technical innovations [1,17,20]. Consequently, designing for disaster response settings has gained increasing currency in HCI [5,7,27,38]. Accordingly, there are a number of recent examples of interactive surfaces being developed that draw their motivation from the need for situational awareness in emergency response situations [2,23,24,26,28].…”