ABSTRACT
Human factors enjoys the greatest leverage for useful design contributions early on in system development, when no large pools of resources have yet been committed to concrete prototypes or designs. But the methodological challenge of anticipating the cognitive reverberations of technology change early on is considerable. We attempted to evaluate the impact of new technology and procedures on cognitive work early on in the context of proposals for a future air traffic management world. Of particular interest was the vision that the future airspace would be ‘managed by exception’, where operators choose optimal flight paths in real time, and controllers are exception monitors/managers. Technology independent difficulties and timeless airspace constraints were wedded to proposed technologies and procedures to create ‘future incident’ scenarios. Expert practitioners were taken on cognitive walkthroughs of these incidents, and anchored in the details of coordination and decision making necessary to handle the situation. Thus, some of the cognitive complexity of management by exception was exposed. Refinements could be made to previous human factors requirements while new ones emerged.
