Building a birds eye view: collaborative work in disaster response

Fischer, Joel; Reeves, Stuart; Rodden, Tom; Reece, Steve; Ramchurn, Sarvapali; Jones, David

Abstract

Command and control environments ranging from transport control rooms to disaster response have long been of interest to HCI and CSCW as rich sites of interactive technology use embedded in work practice. Drawing on our engagement with disaster response teams, including ethnography of their training work, we unpack the ways in which situational uncertainty is managed while a shared operational 'picture' is constituted through various practices around tabletop work. Our analysis reveals how this picture is collaboratively assembled as a socially shared object and displayed by drawing on digital and physical resources. Accordingly, we provide a range of principles implicated by our study that guide the design of systems augmenting and enriching disaster response work practices. In turn, we propose the Augmented Bird Table to illustrate how our principles can be implemented to support tabletop work.

Citation

Fischer, J., Reeves, S., Rodden, T., Reece, S., Ramchurn, S., & Jones, D. Building a birds eye view: collaborative work in disaster response. Presented at ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15)

• Conference Name: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15)
• End Date: Apr 23, 2015
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: May 22, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 6, 2015
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Tabletop, Disaster Response, Ethnography, Collaboration, Situation Awareness, Uncertainty, Crisis Informatics
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/988219
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702313
• Additional Information: Published in: CHI '15: proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York : ACM, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-4503-3145-6. pp. 4103-4112, doi: 10.1145/2702123.2702313