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Principles of Work Domain Analysis (WDA) and Ecological Interface Design (EID) are illustrated using the example of a graphical interface designed to support clinical decision making with respect to cardiovascular health. Multiple iterations of the graphical interface will be presented that show the iterative analysis and design process and the logic of mapping meaningful dimensions into a representation that helps healthcare professionals to understand a complex biological system.

Cognitive Work Analysis is an original method that seeks to describe work systems made up of nested sets of constraints, from ecological constraints imposed by the work domain to cognitive constraints. This top-down approach starts with a work domain model in order to analyze and specify contexts of activity. To complement this method, we propose a bottom-up version of Cognitive Work Analysis focusing on contexts of activity and depicting how operators adapt to the ecological constraints. Based on Rasmussen's Dynamic Safety Model, the ecological constraints involved are those bounding the workspace in which operators dynamically navigate with control loops, strategies, work organization, and competencies. This analysis relies on the simulation of specific contexts of activity. A first illustrative application of this framework to a simulated medical emergency situation with a team of nurses and nursing aids shows that this framework can help identify design issues.

The design of digital information management systems for healthcare presents developers with several formidable engineering challenges. These systems must manage huge amounts of data and support communications across disparate platforms and divisions within a healthcare organization. They must ensure that data is kept private, secure, and available to the right people at the right time. However, as shown in other complex systems (e.g., nuclear power), simply making data available may be insufficient. The goals in designing digital healthcare as a ‘cognitive system’ are to present patient information in more meaningful ways, to help healthcare professionals become more productive, and to support healthcare professionals with clinical decision making. This paper describes how principles of cognitive systems engineering (CSE) and user experience (UX) design were applied to Cardiac Consultant, an interactive cardiovascular risk calculator, with those goals in mind.

Objective: The objective is to provide a review of ecological interface design (EID), to illustrate its value to human factors/ergonomics, and to identify areas for future research and development. Background: EID uses mature interface technologies to provide decision making and problem solving support. A variety of theoretical concepts and analytical tools have been developed to meet the associated challenges. EID provides support that is simultaneously grounded in the practical realities of a work domain and tailored to human capabilities and limitations. Method: EID’s theoretical foundation is discussed briefly. Concrete examples of ecological and traditional interfaces are provided. Different categories of work domains are described, as well as the associated implications for interface design. A targeted literature review is conducted and the experimental outcomes are summarized. A representative evaluation is discussed, and interpretations of performance are provided. Results: The evidence reveals that EID has been remarkably successful in significantly improving performance for work domains with constraints that are law driven (e.g., process control). In contrast, work domains that are intent-driven (e.g., information retrieval) have, by and large, been ignored. Also, few studies have addressed nonvisual displays. Conclusion: EID has not yet realized its potential to improve safety and efficiency across the entire continuum of work domains. Application: EID provides a single integrated framework that is (a) sufficiently comprehensive to deal with complicated work domains and (b) capable of producing innovative support that will generalize to actual work settings.

A great challenge for cognitive neuroscience is studying human behavior in its complexity as it manifests in the real world. The field of aviation provides a unique opportunity to investigate how perception, action and cognition interact in complex yet controlled ecologically valid environments. We suggest a novel cross-domain approach that combines insights from ecological psychology and embodied cognition with a neurophysiological framework to explain patterns of human performance across a variety of aviation contexts. Specifically, we argue that studying the interaction between an agent and the environment, as manifest in the Mirror Neuron system as a neural correlate, is key to understanding complex behavior. We can describe the experience and skills involved with task-relevant actions – like flying an airplane – using brain mechanisms of motor simulation of the observed action. With this direct coupling between perception and action, the automatic implicit nature of the Mirror Neuron system c...

There is great excitement in the healthcare field about the prospects of digital medicine and the associated availability of Big Data for supporting new discoveries that lead to improved healthcare. However, less attention has been devoted to the problem of using the power of digital systems (e.g., EHRs) for communicating the results from these discoveries to practicing clinical healthcare workers. This is the Little Data Problem. This paper discusses how the frameworks of CSE and UXD are helping designers to address the Little Data Problem. The focus is on designing software and interfaces that function as cognitive tools improving situation awareness and supporting sensemaking. Work to develop an app to help people assess cardiovascular health is described as a concrete example of how CSE and UXD principles are being applied to design technologies that support evidence-based clinical practice.

This paper provides an introduction to Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) and Ecological Interface Design (EID), as important complements to more conventional Human Factors Engineering approaches. These complementary perspectives are essential for supporting productive thinking in complex work domains, such as healthcare. We suggest that EHR systems provide a unique opportunity to take advantage of these approaches to support Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) in healthcare and we show examples of these approaches to three different healthcare problems: cardiovascular health, pain management, and anemia.

An extended version of the Rasmussen’s Dynamic Safety Model was implemented to empirically index team activity during a medical emergency. The video recordings of two emergency training sessions during the simulation of an adverse event with two paramedical teams were analyzed with a coding scheme based on the model. We show that individual’s allocation of perceptions and actions to multiple work constraints (i.e., patient’s state monitoring, information processing with team, and equipment management) can be dynamically tracked.

The central thesis of this paper is that Rasmussen framed his approach to Cognitive Systems Engineering from the perspective of a Triadic Semiotic Model. This frame became the context for integrating multiple intellectual threads including Control Theory, Information Theory, Ecological Psychology, and Gestalt Psychology into a coherent theoretical framework. The case is made that the triadic semiotic framework is essential for a complete appreciation of the constructs that were central to Rasmussen's approach: Abstraction Hierarchy, Skill-Rules-Knowledge Model, Ecological Interface Design, and Proactive Risk Management.

This article explores the “hot hand illusion” from the perspective of ecological rationality. Monte Carlo simulations were used to test the sensitivity of typical tests for randomness to plausible ...

As designers and cognitive scientists begin to explore human experience as a relation between people and products, there is a need for constructs that index relational properties (i.e., properties of a product that are dependent on properties of an actor). One such construct that has recently become popular with designers is affordance. Affordances, such as pass-through-able, depend on properties of both an object (e.g., width of an opening) and properties of an actor (e.g., girth or shoulder width). In this article, three relational constructs are suggested to reflect important properties of the coupling between humans and products: affording, specifying, and satisfying. Affording refers to constraints on the action coupling between actor and product. Specifying refers to constraints on the perceptual or informational coupling. Finally, satisfying refers to constraints on value (e.g., attractiveness or desirability). The case is made that each of these three constructs are critical to determining the quality of the experience of an agent with a product (e.g., the capacity for satisfying interactions).

The guiding premise of this chapter is that a primary function of interfaces in complex systems is to couple intention, perception, and action. That is, the goal of interface design is to specify the field of possible actions that can be performed and the potential consequences of those actions relative to the functional goals and values of an organization. In this context, the interface is seen as a component of a triadic semiotic (or sensemaking) system. This chapter describes a holistic approach to this system, consistent with a belief that the function of the interface can only be fully understood in the context of emergent dynamics of the full sensemaking system.

The fundamental premise of this chapter is that expertise is not a property of any particular stage of information processing, nor is it a property of an individual. Rather it is the property of a triadic semiotic system where the quality of performance depends on the coupling of an agent with a problem ecology through a representation. The dynamics of this coupling is akin to a self-organizing, adaptive control system. The case is made that many of the debates about the nature of expertise arise from the different ways that people have parsed the triadic system into sub-components (elements or dyads). Thus, the fundamental point of this chapter is to support the claim that when it comes to expertise, the whole (the semiotic triad) is much more than the sum of the pieces.

Over the last decade, the efforts toward unraveling the complex interplay between the brain, body, and environment have set a promising line of research that utilizes neuroscience to study human performance in natural work contexts such as aviation. Thus, a relatively new discipline called neuroergonomics is holding the promise of studying the neural mechanisms underlying human performance in pursuit of both theoretical and practical insights. In this work, we utilized a neuroergonomic approach by combining insights from ecological psychology and embodied cognition to study flight expertise. Specifically, we focused on the Mirror Neuron system as a key correlate for understanding the interaction between an individual and the environment, suggesting that it can be used to index changes in the coupling of perception-action associated with skill development. In this study, we measured the EEG mu suppression as a proxy of the Mirror Neuron system in experts (pilots) and novices while performing a distance estimation task in a landing scenario. To survey the specificity of this measure, we considered central, parietal and occipital electrode pools and analyzed alpha (8-13 Hz) and beta (18-25 Hz) rhythm bands. We hypothesized that in experts vs. novices, specific neural sensorimotor brain activity would underpin the connection between perception and action in an in-flight context. Preliminary results indicate that alpha and beta rhythm suppression was area-specific irrespective of groups, present in the central electrodes placed over the motor areas. Group analysis revealed that specifically alpha mu rhythm, but not beta, was significantly more suppressed in pilots vs. novices. Complementing these findings we found a trend in which the strength of mu suppression increased with the sense of presence experienced by the pilots. Such sensorimotor activation is in line with the idea that for a pilot, a distance judgment is intimately associated with the function of landing. This reflects the ability to use optical invariants to see the world in terms of the capabilities of the aircraft (e.g., reachability and glide angle). These preliminary findings support the role of embodied simulation mechanisms in visual perception and add important insights into a practical understanding of flight expertise, suggesting sensorimotor mechanisms as potential neuro-markers.

Effectiveness in sociotechnical systems often depends on coordination among multiple agents (including both humans and autonomous technologies). This means that autonomous technologies must be designed to function as collaborative systems, or team players. In many complex work domains, success is beyond the capabilities of humans unaided by technologies. However, at the same time, human capabilities are often critical to ultimate success, as all automated control systems will eventually face problems their designers did not anticipate. Unfortunately, there is often an either/or attitude with respect to humans and technology that tends to focus on optimizing the separate human and autonomous components, with the design of interfaces and team processes as an afterthought. The current paper discusses the limitations of this approach and proposes an alternative where the goal of design is a seamless integration of human and technological capabilities into a well-functioning sociotechnical system. Drawing lessons from both the academic (SRK Framework) and commercial (IBM’s Watson, video games) worlds, suggestions for enriching the coupling between the human and automated systems by considering both technical and social aspects are discussed.