Ethnographically-informed systems development for air traffic control

The overriding importance of safety in ATC requires incremental development of both technology and procedure. The authors describe an approach being used in a project which is looking at the electronic display of information in ATC. This project is novel in that requirements for such displays are being informed by an ethnographic study which has been performed at the London Air Traffic Control Centre (LATCC). Insights provided by this study regarding the nature of the teamwork in ATC have led the system developers to question some conventional assumptions regarding computer systems design. A generator system called MEAD has been developed which specifically addresses the problems of creating and managing the kinds of multi-user interfaces found in cooperative domains like ATC. The system provides high level tools for the rapid prototyping and refinement of electronic displays as well as a run-time architecture which allows these displays to be evaluated in cooperative environments