Any good reading on this? Might be some interesting learning opportunities for (cyber)security monitoring, which is a total mess right now. Stakes are a bit less severe, but still.
I would recommend Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild". He examines the performance of the crew of a ship acting as distributed intelligence and the many factors that go into making them an effective unit (or not).
Ed was also part of the UCSD Cognitive Science department at the time of the Vincennes incident and I suspect it was his work, along with Don Norman's, that drew the attention of the Navy. At the time, I was doing an undergraduate independent study in his lab, where we spent hours watching videos of airline pilots in 747 flight simulators, looking out for errors while using the flight guidance system. Our "textbook" was the operations manual for the 747 guidance and autopilot system.
An example of the sort of UI things we were looking for:
"Improvements" such as replacing the analog altimeter and airspeed indicators with digital readouts deprived pilots of operational awareness as they could no longer estimate rate of descent by watching the movement of the hands of the analog meters.
I find the glass cockpit airspeed/altitude tapes to be significantly worse overall than analog dials. Not only is it easier to see rate of descent, but it's very easy to see whether the absolute number is where you want it to be. Normally if you're cruising, you will be at an even thousand or 500 foot increment. The big hand should either be pointing straight up or straight down. You can even see out of the corner of your eye if you're a little too high or low. On the tape you have to read a 4-5 digit number. Similar thing with airspeed. Once you are familiar with a plane, you know what angle the airspeed needle should be pointing for a particular phase of flight. It's much quicker cognitively to see the angle of a pointer than reading a number.
Overall, though, having flown both, I'd have to argue modern glass cockpits have significantly better UI than the old steam gauges. So many old aircraft didn't even give lip service to helping the aviator with a good instrument scan and just stuffed things willy-nilly.
I recall reading that Thrust II (running at 1000mph but somewhat closer to the ground) used analog meters so that a glance could get an approximate value and rate of change quickly and in a situation of heavy pilot vibration. I couldn't find the original article, but I found this breathless page from the manufacturer which alludes to this.
https://masterhorologer.com/2014/05/03/rolex-unveils-two-bes...
>"Improvements" such as replacing the analog altimeter and airspeed indicators with digital readouts deprived pilots of operational awareness as they could no longer estimate rate of descent by watching the movement of the hands of the analog meters.
I find discoveries like this fascinating. The unconsidered knock on effects of decisions is one that is very difficult to appreciate at the time. Whether they were unconsidered because no effort was deemed necessary, just not enough experience by the decision makers to be aware the item was used for more than just the obvious use, or any other reasons besides any form of incompetence.
This is one of those times where not having enough people involved shows up. So it's a trade off on accepting a continuous rolling bit of changes just to make something happen now, or paralysis by analysis through committee of people to approve changes.
Loved his class at UCSD! It definitely was something that really sticks in your brain and never leaves cause of how unique the subject material and concepts were taught.
I wonder if they would update the theory of “distributed cognition” in an AI ChatGPT Turing complete world with ubiquitous computing. Thoughts?
Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is a great intro to human factors and covers a number of high-stakes environments as well as more mundane things like door handles. Highly recommended reading.
I suggest you check out the work of Gary Klein and the Naturalistic Decision Making community, as the Vicennes work was one of the founding projects. He features it in his 1997 book _Sources of Power_.
