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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts 'FINISHING THE INTERFACE DESIGN': HOW OPERATORS COPE WITH THE DEMANDS OF MONITORING DURING NORMAL OPERATION Emilie Roth Monitoring during emergencies in complex dynamic environments is widely recognized to be an active, selective attention, process that strongly depends on situation assessment. Less is known about monitoring during normal operations. A common assumption is that normal operations is a more placid environment and monitoring in those conditions more closely resembles a vigilance task. This talk describes a field study we recently conducted examining the motivations and strategies for monitoring during normal operations in a dynamic high-risk environment (Mumaw, R., Roth, E., Vicente, K., & Burns, C., 1996). The specific domain of application is nuclear power plant operations. The study was conducted in two different Canadian plants, one with an older control room which is based almost exclusively on analog, hard-wired instrumentation, and another with a newer control room that has a slightly higher degree of computer-based technology. We observed and interviewed power plant operators during normal operation to identify established monitoring practices and to uncover undocumented techniques and strategies used to improve monitoring effectiveness during normal operations. The results of our study suggest that monitoring in a power plant during normal operations is better cast as a problem-solving activity than as a vigilance task. Despite differences in control room technology, we found that in both cases operators devised active strategies to remove or reduce meaningless changes from the interface, create information different from that intended by the designers, and make important information more salient. We call this 'finishing the design'. The empirical findings have been synthesized into a model of operator monitoring, that emphasizes operators' use of strategies for knowledge-driven monitoring and proactive adaptation of the control room interface.
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