Situation Awareness

Inf@Vis! has an article on Situation Awareness by Juan C. Dürsteler a fellow researcher at the Technology Department at UPF.

Situation awareness is what’s needed in many environments in order to operate safely avoiding the appearance of critical situations. When they appear it’s still more important to know instantly the relevant information regarding the crisis.

Situation awareness can be very relevant to ubiquitous environment and showing the causes of uncertainty only when necessary instead of clogging the user’s cognitive system.

Juan talks about a recent Air Transat flight during which the plane flamed out both jets due to a complete loss of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean. The pilots were unable to correctly identify the loss of fuel that happened in one of the turbines. They thought for a long time the oil temperature readings and remaining fuel were wrong due to the unusual situation and the causes that led to it.

This is a clear example of the importance of situation awareness. The information systems in the plane were accurately reporting the situation but with huge amount of detailed information. This goes against Ben Schneiderman’s mantra: “Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand”.

Multifunction displays considerably reduce the cognitive overload and enable the user to see on the screens the most relevant set of information for the flight while the rest of it stays in the background, except when an alarm occurs. This way the pilots provide themselves with a situation awareness that instead of clogging their cognitive system, frees it from the overload other systems impose.