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The objective is to provide a more stable medium for certifying the human error tolerance of dynamic interactive systems. In order to achieve this objective the project aims to: produce a notation for describing scenarios; evaluate the notation in relation to for example: cognitive complexity, workload, spatial and display consistency; evaluate the notation as a means of documentation of incidents and design rationale; evaluate as a representation for early prototyping.Progress:A research associate (Keith Ragoonaden) was appointed on 1 January 1994.We have developed a preliminary notational framework based on Interaction Framework (Harrison and others,1994) for describing scenarios. We have explored the use of this notation as a means of describing accident scenarios, for example the Kegworth British Midland Boeing 737 disaster (AAIB, 1990), and a NASA Boeing 727 simulation (Palen, 1992). We have also explored the forms of analysis that may be applied to such descriptions of scenarios and the connection between them and other suggestions in the literature, for example Rouse [4]. We have maintained a watching brief on mission analysis activities being carried out within BAe Defence (Military Aircraft Division) in order to assess the viability of our approach. A paper is in progress discussing the notation and its role in analysis. We have produced a review of the requirements of a technique for representing and analysing group interaction scenarios, using the Palen scenario (Palen, 1990) as a specific example, in a paper to be presented at Interact 95 (McCarthy and others, in press). We hope to use this work as a basis for assessing the role of cognitive and organisational psychology techniques in analysis of scenarios. Over the next few months we will implement an animation system for scenarios based on the preliminary notation, and are exploring the feasibility of a number of implementation platforms including MacroMedia Director. Air Accidents-Investigations Branch (1990) Report on the Accident to Boeing 737/400 G OBME near Kegworth Leicestershire 8 January 1989. Department of Transport. HMSO. Harrison, M.D., Blandford, A.E & Barnard, P.J. (1994) The Requirements Engineering of User Freedom. In Paterno,. F.,(Ed.) The Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems, Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop, to appear Springer. McCarthy, J.D., Wright, P.C. and Harrison, M.D. (In press). A Requirements space for group-work systems. Proceedings of Interact '95. Palen, L. (1992). Distributed cognition in an airline cockpit; the second officers panel as a communicative resource. Unpublished Thesis. Distributed Cognition Laboratory, University of California, San Diego. Rouse, W.B. (1990) Designing for human error: concepts for error tolerant systems. In H.R. Booher, editor MANPRINT: An approach to systems integration, pages 237-256. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York.
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