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Decisions and collaborative work: a different perspective

Published: 28 August 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Motivation -- The driving theme for this investigation has been to present a different perspective on decision making and the effect of decisions made on the collaboration involved in a complex work process. This work is influenced by the recent change in perception towards the conceptualization of decisions and their bearing on collaborative work. Instead of viewing decisions as just a mental act the change in perception is to view it as a device for managing and coordinating activities (Brown, 2005). This investigation endeavours to demonstrate how decisions made by people in a work process not only determines their individual actions but also supports and facilitates collaborative work. This is achieved by viewing decisions as abstract information resources that encourage appropriate distribution of information, distribution of cognitive tasks, and coordination between individuals and teams involved in the work process.
Research approach -- A series of ethnographically inspired studies carried out to study the work of airport staff (Fields, Amaldi et al., 2005; Selvaraj, 2006) at an European airport over a year has been instrumental in supporting the notion put forth in this paper. Data collection was performed by engaging in observation, note-taking, and semi-structured interviews with personnel in the control tower, etc. Observation sessions typically lasted between two and four hours. The field material consists of data from several sources, i.e. notes, audio recordings, photographs, and interview transcripts. Scenarios have been elicited from transcriptions of audio recordings of conversations taking place between people in the tower and those involved in the activities of the tower as well as from interviews conducted with personnel in the control tower. Apart from this, observation and notes from the fieldwork augment our understanding of these scenarios and help steer the ensuing discussions.
Findings/Design -- This paper is an initial step towards investigating the notion of decisions as mechanisms for organizing collaborative work The analysis of the complex work process of air traffic control reveals that decisions made by individuals and groups in the course of their work activities determine the coordination and integration of contextually appropriate actions and interactions necessary to accomplish tasks.
Take away message -- Rethink the notion of decision making; decisions play a significant role in organizing various aspects of collaborative work and are not just mental acts.

References

[1]
Brown, B. (2005). Choice and Mobility: decision making on the move. Draft, presented at SASE panel on Mobile Geographies, 2005. Available as http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~barry/papers.html.
[2]
Erickson, T. and Kellogg, A. W. (2000). Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7, 1, 59--83.
[3]
Fields, E. R., Amaldi, P. and Tassi, A. (2005). Representing collaborative work: The airport as common information space. Cognition, Technology and Work, 7, 119--133.
[4]
Hutchins, E., ed. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
[5]
Roger, Y. and Ellis, J. (1994). Distributed Cognition: an alternative framework for analysing and explaining collaborative working. Journal of Information Technology, 9, 2, 119--128.
[6]
Schmidt, K. (1991). Riding a Tiger, or Computer Supported Cooperative Work. In Proceedings of the ECSCW'91, Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Amsterdam, 24--27 September, 1991), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1--16.
[7]
Selvaraj, N. (2006). Collaborative decision making in complex safety critical systems: A common information space approach. In Proceedings of the Workshop HCT 2006: Human Centred Technologies Workshop (University of Sussex, Brighton, 11--12 Sep, 2006), 4--6.
[8]
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London.
[9]
Wright, C. P., Fields, E. R. and Harrison, D. M. (2000). Analyzing Human-Computer Interaction as Distributed Cognition: The Resources Model. Human Computer Interaction, 15, 1.

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  • (2020)From Paper Flight Strips to Digital Strip Systems: Changes and Similarities in Air Traffic Control Work PracticesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33928334:CSCW1(1-21)Online publication date: 29-May-2020
  1. Decisions and collaborative work: a different perspective

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ECCE '07: Proceedings of the 14th European conference on Cognitive ergonomics: invent! explore!
    August 2007
    334 pages
    ISBN:9781847998491
    DOI:10.1145/1362550
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • The British Computer Society
    • ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
    • SIGCHI: Specialist Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction of the ACM
    • Interactions, the Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Group of the BCS
    • Middlesex University, London, School of Computing Science
    • European Office of Aerospace Research and Development, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, United States Air Force Research Laboratory
    • EACE: European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics
    • Brunel University, West London, Department of Information Systems and Computing

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 28 August 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. air traffic control
    2. collaborative work
    3. decision making
    4. distributed cognition
    5. resources model
    6. shared mental models

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    ECCE07: European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2007
    August 28 - 31, 2007
    London, United Kingdom

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    • (2020)From Paper Flight Strips to Digital Strip Systems: Changes and Similarities in Air Traffic Control Work PracticesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33928334:CSCW1(1-21)Online publication date: 29-May-2020

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