ABSTRACT
The popularity of SituationAwareness (SA), the concept that focuses on how operators in complex systems acquire and maintain awareness of ‘what is going on’ (Endsley, 1995a), continues to rise. Notwithstanding this, and over two decades of scientific investigation, SA remains a contentious topic; the inescapable conclusion arrived upon by the authors following reviews of SA theory (Salmon et al., 2008) and measures (Salmon et al., 2006) is that there are still significant issues that need to be confronted. Of most relevance given the increasing presence of teams within complex sociotechnical systems (Fiore et al, 2003) are the limitations of existing models (e.g. Endsley, 1995a; Smith & Hancock, 1995 etc) and measures (e.g. Endsley, 1995b) when applied to collaborative systems. The aim of this article is to describe new approaches to both problems, including a recently developed distributed cognition based model of SA in collaborative environments and an accompanying modelling approach. Both are subsequently demonstrated using a case study example from the defence domain and, in closing, the implications of the model and case study findings for the design of defence systems are discussed.
