Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
(Hollnagel and Woods
2005
; Woods and Hollnagel
2006
). Cognitive ergonomics is
concerned with human-machine systems. Here, machine is taken to represent any
artifact that is designed for a specific purpose. There are technological aspects to
these systems, which are investigated from the perspective of how they affect
use. These systems are always embedded in a socio-technical context because
people are involved in the design, construction, testing, and use of these systems.
Although CSE practitioners regard all systems as socio-technical systems, they
usually draw a distinction between the technological system, in which the tech-
nology plays the central role in determining what happens, and the organizational
system, in which people mainly determine what happens.
CSE is concerned with applicable, approximate models of how people perceive,
process, attend to, and use information to achieve their goals. Aimed at designers,
instructors, and users, CSE draws on many areas of psychology that are often
taught separately, such as planning, language, problem solving, learning, memory,
and perception. However, CSE addresses how such processes work together. It is
different to the direct application of cognitive psychology in that it does not look at
cognitive processes in isolation, but at their integration and how they are involved
in particular activities or situations. CSE also differs from cognitive psychology in
focusing on theories which can predict behavior in what have been called real
world settings, rather than laboratory settings, although results from laboratory
settings are considered informative. Real world settings may require a more
detailed treatment of, for example, individual differences, uncertainty, ad hoc
problem solving, and so on, than many other branches of psychology. CSE also
places greater emphasis on the co-agency of action between the user and the
machine, but, again, this is a difference in emphasis and these fields overlap to a
great extent.
CSE is thus largely concerned with applications in complex dynamic domains,
such as aviation, industrial process control, healthcare, and so on. It normally starts
by attempting to understand the issue at hand, using observation to try to under-
stand the patterns of work. It then uses this understanding to guide the search to
identify what would be useful to support the types of work that have been
observed. These insights are then used as a basis for (innovative) design, in par-
ticipation with others, to support the work, the processes of change, and optimizing
the process.
2.2.2 Socio-Technical Systems Design
The term socio-technical systems was originally coined by Emery and Trist (
1960
)to
describe systems that involve a complex interaction between humans, machines, and
the environmental aspects of the work system—something that is true of most
systems in the workplace. The corollary of this definition is that all of these factors—
people, machines, and context—need to be taken into account when developing
Search WWH ::
Custom Search