ABSTRACT
This paper reports an ongoing study of coordination practices in control room operations concerned with conducting experiments on the International Space Station (ISS). Work in this setting is heavily based on control of engineering system by procedures, and distributed coordination by protocols. We describe how communication is structured, but also how it is improvised and evolve within this setting, particularly to handle the temporal constraints of task execution. The paper outlines the context of space research as a field for studying complex distributed work with low risk tolerance; it discusses a methodological set up designed for this purpose, as well as some preliminary findings. These concern informal strategies in which thoroughly planned tasks are aligned with situational constraints, particularly temporal. Our observations have relevance for (among others things) discussions of shared/distributed situation awareness and resilience, and we see promise in the methodological set-up.
