Identifying and Capturing the Cognitive Demands Imposed by New Systems

"The fast pace of technological change has pushed military procurement into a design environment in which traditional evolutionary design methods no longer satisfy the need to take advantage of the new functionality that is now emerging. No aspect of thisnew demand is more taxing than the design for human participation. A more systematic, human-oriented approach is needed to elicit and define the cognitive requirements associated with new systems. For knowledge acquisition, we will draw on the methods andtools developed for Cognitive Work Analysis, which constitutes a set of methodologies for acquisition and representation of the domain and subject matter knowledge essential to the design of complex, distributed socio-technical systems. The proposed methodwill move the design of complex multi-person human-machine systems from an ad hoc process that is largely based on heuristics toward a more systematic, scientific process based on analysis and modeling. Furthermore, there is no systematic well-defined"bridge" between knowledge elicitation techniques and constructive simulation models. A goal of the proposed effort is to build this bridge by creating a systematic approach, with a supporting tool suite, for translating the products of our cognitiverequirements analyses into a format compatible with that required for our quantitative model. A tool that can support design of human-system integration requirements for complex, large-scale