The Design of Future Things by Norman Donald A

Author:Norman, Donald A. [Norman, Donald A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business, Psychology, Science
ISBN: 9780465013036
Amazon: B06XC86LC1
Goodreads: 18688837
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2006-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

The Problem of Inappropriate Automation

I once argued that the current state of automation was fundamentally unsound because it was in the dangerous middle ground, neither fully automated nor fully manual. Either have no automation or full automation, I argued, but what we have today is halfway automation. Even worse, the system takes over when the going is easy and gives up, usually without any warning, when the going gets tough—just the reverse of what you would want.

If an airplane pilot or car driver is aware of the vehicle’s state, the environment, and the location and condition of all other vehicles and, moreover, is continually reacting and interpreting this information, the person is an essential part of the control loop: perceiving the situation, deciding upon an appropriate action to take, executing that action, and then monitoring the result. You are “in the loop” every time you drive your car with care, paying full attention to all that is happening around you. For that matter, you are in the loop while cooking, washing, or even playing a video game, as long as you are continually involved in judging the situation, deciding what to do, and evaluating the result.

A closely related concept is that of situation awareness, which refers to a person’s knowledge of the context, the current state of things, and what might happen next. In theory, a person could still be in the loop, stay fully aware of the situation, even with completely automated equipment, by continually monitoring the vehicle’s actions and assessing the situation, being ready to step in when needed. This passive observation is not very rewarding, however, especially as airplane pilots and automobile drivers might have to maintain this state for many hours on long-distance trips. In experimental psychology, this situation is often called vigilance, and the experimental and theoretical studies of vigilance demonstrate deterioration in performance with time. People just can’t keep focused on mindless tasks for very long.

When people are “out of the loop,” they are no longer informed. If something goes wrong and immediate response is required, they cannot provide it effectively. Instead, considerable time and effort is required to get back “into the loop,” and by then, it may be too late.

A second problem with automated equipment is the tendency to rely on the automation, even when there are difficulties with it. Two British psychologists, Neville Stanton and Mark Young of Brunel University, studied drivers using adaptive cruise control in an automobile simulator. They found that when the automation worked, things were fine, but when the adaptive cruise control failed, the drivers had more accidents than did drivers without the fancy technology. This is a common finding: safety equipment does indeed increase safety, until it fails. When people learn to rely upon automation, they are not only out of the loop but often too trusting of the automation. When it fails, they are less likely to catch problems than they would be if they didn’t have automated equipment at all. This phenomenon has been found in every domain studied, be it among airline pilots, train operators, or automobile drivers.

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