Is your system design keeping humans ‘in-the-loop’?

Anirudh (Ani) Kedia
4 min readAug 21, 2020
A rocket being launched into space
Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

I was recently watching the historic launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket when I noticed something really interesting. While the astronauts were going through their pre-launch checklists and callouts, I heard this phrase — “We now have situation awareness.” Before that, I was just waiting for the final countdown to start but, hearing the term ‘situation awareness’ being called out made me sit up and pay attention. It was fascinating to see an integral concept in Human Factors get a mention in a historic space launch. It made me think about how far this concept has come since the 1980s when it first gained prominence. I will attempt to give a brief description of this concept and its relevance to Human Factors.

The most widely cited definition of situation awareness (SA) describes it as the “perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future” (Endsley, 1988, p. 97). Notably, SA is not just knowing what is in your immediate surroundings, but also requires active sensemaking and prediction on behalf of the individual.

As a concept, SA has heavily influenced system design and training; especially in dynamic and complex environments like aviation, where the human is routinely subjected to time-critical tasks and multi-tasking situations. This concept has reinforced the notion that system designers cannot assume a passive role and simply present all available information as-is to the operator. Rather, designers must pay attention to how they present specific types of information.

The act of maintaining SA is a demanding one and involves the use of significant mental resources. In a complex environment, it is obvious that the human will have other tasks at hand besides maintaining SA. These other tasks will also demand some attentional resources. For example, while flying an airplane, the resources of a pilot will already be depleted as they will also be used for communication, decision making, maintaining flight control, etc. Although it would be unfair to expect the pilot to maintain perfect SA in such an environment, we cannot excuse poor SA simply because it is difficult to maintain. SA has been shown to have important implications for decision making, diagnosis, and…

--

--

Anirudh (Ani) Kedia

Sr. UX Researcher at BlinkUX | Research | Design | Psychology | Making UX accessible one article at a time