Safety Critical Environments, i.e., systems whose failure either endanger human life or cause drastic economic losses, form the technological backbone of today’s society and are an integral part in such vastly diverse industrial sectors as automotive, aerospace, maritime, production, energy, health care, banking. Such systems are safety critical – human errors, technical failures, and malicious manipulation of information can cause catastrophic events leading to loss of life. Over many years, critical incidents have been analyzed in detail but was has been searched for was the human error. Human machine interaction plays a crucial role in these systems, in which typically expert users are controlling and interacting with complex systems.
The deployment of more and more complex command and control systems has not yet received widespread attention by researchers and academia. Investigations in HCI are often centered on specific single-to-narrow-purpose interface in a specific context. The multi-faceted complexity of application-oriented domains such as aerospace, maritime, health, production, or energy and the general and fundamental challenges they pose to human interaction did not get in the focus of CHI to a sufficient degree.
One of the dimensions of the complexity of these safety-critical systems lies in the integration of all these devices to constitute a usable (efficient, effective, and satisfying to use) system. Another dimension lies in the multiple stakeholders involved in the design, development, deployment, training, maintenance and certification of these systems.
The problems surrounding design of safety-critical interaction and safety-critical systems are receiving more and more public attention due to the increased deployment of these systems and the resulting failures. Navy has been reporting removing touch technologies from the command and control systems of battleships following the collision between USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald. The simplified version of the command and control room highlights the multiplicity of operator workstations and technologies.
In this workshop, we want to discuss practice, research, and current knowledge in the area of safety critical interactions