Keynote (Monday)
20th UIST @ Newport, RI

David Woods

Biographical Sketch

David Woods is Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Institute for Ergonomics at the Ohio State University. He helped pioneer the foundations and practice of Cognitive Systems Engineering—the study of how people cope with complexity and the design of computers as team players with human practitioners-- since its origins in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident in nuclear power. He has summarized the approach and results in the two recent books with Erik Hollnagel --Joint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering (2005) and the new Patterns in Cognitive Systems Engineering (2006). He has investigated accidents in nuclear power, space operations, anesthesiology, health care, and aviation, and developed ways to go “behind the label human error” to enhance systems safety in works like Behind Human Error (1994) and A Tale of Two Stories: Contrasting Views on Patient Safety (1998).

Dr. Woods has served on National Academy of Science and other advisory committees including recently Aerospace Research Needs (2003), Engineering the Delivery of Health Care (2005), and Dependable Software (2006). He has testified to U.S. Congress on Safety at NASA and on Election Reform. He was one of the founding board members of the National Patient Safety Foundation, Associate Director of the Midwest Center for Inquiry on Patient Safety of the Veterans Health Administration, and advisor to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

Dr. Woods has been President of the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society. He is a Fellow of that society as well as the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association. He has shared the Ely Award for best paper in the journal Human Factors (1994), a Laurels Award from Aviation Week and Space Technology (1995) for research on the human factors of highly automated cockpits, the Jack Kraft Innovators Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (2002), an IBM Faculty Award (2005) and five patents for computerized decision aids.

A new direction in his work is how to engineer resilience into systems that manage high risk processes. He is co-editor of the new book on this topic -- Resilience Engineering (2006).

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Keynote (Monday), October 8, 2007,   9:30 - 10:30 am
Measuring How Design Changes Cognition at Work


David Woods
Institute for Ergonomics, The Ohio State University
woods.2(at)osu.edu

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.

The software intensive interactive systems and devices under development around us are valuable to the degree that they expand what people in various roles and organizations can achieve. How can we measure this value provided to others? Are current measures of usability adequate? Does creeping complexity wipe out incremental gains as products evolve? Do designers and developers mis-project the impact when systems-to-be-realized are fielded? Which technology changes will trigger waves of expansive adaptations that transform what people do and even why they do it?

Sponsors of projects to develop new interactive software systems are asking developers for tangible evidence of the value to be delivered to those people responsible for activities and goals in the world. Traditional measures of usability and human performance seem inadequate. Cycles of inflation in the claims development organizations make (and the legacy of disappointment and surprise) have left sponsors numb and eroded trust. Thus, we need to provide new forms of evidence about the potential of new interactive systems and devices to enhance human capability.

Luckily, this need has been accompanied by a period of innovation in ways to measure the impact of new designs on:

  • growth of expertise in roles,
  • synchronizing activities over wider scopes and ranges,
  • expanding adaptive capacities.

This talk reviews a few of the new measures being tested in each of these categories, points to some of the underlying science, and uses these examples to trigger discussion about how design of future interactive software provides will provide value to stakeholders.

 

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