In Sweden, the hottest issues in the domain of crisis response is “technologies to provide common operating picture” and theories on situational awareness to conceptualize the key features in such technologies.

We see many examples of design suggestions for common operating picture, but there are very few detailed analyses of how it could be achieved in practice. The solution seems always to be a map with some dots illustrating objects on a certain location and the actors on the same location. We see very few reports where researchers actually analyze how situation awareness is obtained and how information technology provide means to accomplish that.

Mica Endsley and associates provide from a cognitive perspective a set of important theories on this issue. They have studied the cognitive processes behind situation awareness and come up with some really nice results. However, they also explain the complexity in designing systems that actually will improve situation awareness.

I am longing for a project where my research group could get funding to look how the cognitive tradition regarding situation awareness could be combined with other related perspectives. As an example. it would be nice to try to combine Mica Endsleys work with for example Karl Weick´s work on sensemaking. Both Endsley and Weick make also references to the work by Garry Klein in the Naturalistic Decision Making community.

I am not too sure if it would be possible to combine these three different knowledge domains but it would be a very nice job to give it a try.