We have a publication at CHI 2015 entitled Building a Birds Eye View: Collaborative Work in Disaster Response (click to download the PDF). This paper reports an ethnomethodological study of disaster response mission planning of Rescue Global.
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.
Video
The video describes Rescue Global’s role in the multi-national training exercise that provided the site of our study (courtesy of Rescue Global).
Reference
Fischer, J.E., Reeves, S., Rodden, T., Reece, S., Ramchurn, S.D. and Jones, D. Building a Birds Eye View: Collaborative Work in Disaster Response. Proc. CHI ’15. ACM Press (2015). This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it. Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment. Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham. This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer system, you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.