Designing interactive systems: key issues for a holistic approach

In the age of modern society, systems are growing in complexity where technology and other hardware equipment, pre-defined procedures and practices as well as human operators are integrated. Safety concerns and economic pressure urge for increasing the degree of automation for such systems. But essential parts that can and should not be mapped to technology exist. Especially in emergency situations and complex decision making, human actors are the main carriers of knowledge and hence have the major responsibility to achieve the process goals. Yet, this knowledge may not always be transparent to the overall organisation; many work procedures remain informal and embedded in social practices among a local community of workers. The thesis at hand investigates the specific role of the different system resources and their strong interdependencies within complex interactive systems. Interaction among different system components turns out to be very crucial. The insights from a case study underline the need for a broader perspective on the various bearers and stakeholders of knowledge. However, many traditional development concepts often put the main focus on one or a few components in isolation. A holistic design concept is put forward aimed at the integration of different system components. These components include human and machine agents, formal rules and procedures, social work practices, organisational, political and socio-cultural factors etc. Basic to the approach are: a holistic view throughout the development lifecycle, integration of different development dimensions, distributed knowledge and distributed cognition theory, thorough work analysis and elicitation of critical issues, specification of functional, cognitive and quality requirements, design with mock-ups and prototypes and continuous evaluation. A multidisciplinary team with active user participation and the use of scenarios as development tools are as well part of the design rationale.