Releasing Human Adaptive Power through Design Innovation

The various fields associated with interactive software systems engage in design activities to enable people who would use the resulting systems to meet goals, coordinate with others, find meaning, and express themselves in myriad ways. Yet many development projects fail, and we all have contact with clumsy software-based systems that force work-arounds and impose substantial attentional, knowledge and workload burdens. On the other hand, field observations reveal people re-shaping the artifacts they encounter and interact with as resources to cope with the demands of the situations they face as they seek to meet their goals. In this process some new devices are quickly seized upon and exploited in ways that transform the nature of human activity, connections, and expression.

These experiences can be seen as an adaptive process triggered by the bottlenecks or opportunities introduced by new systems. “Gap filling adaptations” by users occur when designs introduce various kinds of bottlenecks in ongoing activities, and “expansive adaptations” occur when leaders exploit new capabilities to transform activity and goals. The talk presents results on these adaptive processes from studies of new technology in crisis management and new technology in health care (electronic intensive care units). The data suggest an adaptive systems view of technology change process – linked expansion-constriction model of technology adaptation.

Speaker Details

David Woods, Professor of Cognitive Human Factors at Ohio State University, studies how people cope with complexity in time pressured situations such as critical care medicine, aviation, space missions, intelligence analysis, and crisis management. He designs new systems to help people find meaning in large data fields when they are under pressure to diagnose anomalies and re-plan activities. His latest work is model and measure the adaptive capacities of organizations and distributed systems to determine how they are resilient and if they are becoming too brittle in the face of change. Past-President of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Laurel Award from Aviation Week and Space Technology, advisor to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, founding board member of the National Patient Safety Foundation, member of several National Academy of Science committees, most recently on Dependable Software, and author of four books.

Date:
Speakers:
David Woods
Affiliation:
Ohio State University