Introduction
Imagine being given the task of designing a decision support system to aid military commanders in planning troop movements. How would you determine the information to display? How would you determine the format in which to display the information in order to facilitate effective decision making? How would you effectively distribute tasks across team members (and across automated systems)? How would you know when you had developed a usable and effective system that leads to increased performance?
These are the types of design questions that can be addressed by the methods of Cognitive Engineering. Cognitive Engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to designing computerized systems intended to support human performance
(Roth, Patterson, & Mumaw,
2001). It encompasses the fields of human factors, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence and other related fields. The methods of Cognitive Engineering consider workers and the tasks they perform as the central drivers for system design.
As the figure above shows, the methods of Cognitive Engineering are quite diverse. Certain methods aim to get an understanding of users and tasks by constructing quantitative models of expert reasoning. Other methods focus on documenting the key decisions made in the domain and the information required to make those decisions. The aim is to develop systems that support cognitive functions such as problem solving, planning, decision making, perception, memory, situation assessment, monitoring, and prioritizing. Question that drive design and are addressed by methods of Cognitive Engineering include:
- What are the goals and constraints of the application domain?
- What range of tasks do domain practitioners perform?
- What strategies do the use to perform these tasks today?
- What factors contribute to task complexity?
- What tools can be provided to facilitate the work of domain practitioners and achieve their goals more effectively.
(Roth, Patterson, & Mumaw, 2001).