Our fascination with new technologies is based on the assumption
that more powerful automation will overcome human limitations and
make our systems 'faster, better, cheaper, ' resulting in simple,
easy tasks for people. But how does new technology and more
powerful automation change our work? Research in Cognitive Systems
Engineering (CSE) looks at the intersection of people, technology,
and work. What it has found is not stories of simplification
through more automation, but stories of complexity and adaptation.
When work changed through new technology, practitioners had to cope
with new complexities and tighter constraints. They adapted their
strategies and the artifacts to work around difficulties and
accomplish their goals as responsible agents. The surprise was that
new powers had transformed work, creating new roles, new decisions,
and new vulnerabilities. Ironically, more autonomous machines have
created the requirement for more sophisticated forms of
coordination across people, and across people and machines, to
adapt to new demands and pressures. This book synthesizes these
emergent Patterns though stories about coordination and
mis-coordination, resilience and brittleness, affordance and
clumsiness in a variety of settings, from a hospital intensive care
unit, to a nuclear power control room, to a space shuttle control
center. The stories reveal how new demands make work difficult, how
people at work adapt but get trapped by complexity, and how people
at a distance from work oversimplify their perceptions of the
complexities, squeezing practitioners. The authors explore how CSE
observes at the intersection of people, technology, and work, how
CSE abstracts patterns behind thesurface details and wide
variations, and how CSE discovers promising new directions to help
people cope with complexities. The stories of CSE show that one key
to well-adapted work is the ability to be prepared to be surprised.
Are you ready?
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