Book review: Anders af Wåhlberg: Driver Behaviour and Accident Research Methodology; Unresolved Problems

Anders af Wåhlberg has apparently written this book starting from a negative attitude. He has his own ideas about what is acceptable in traffic psychology research and what is not. Throughout the book he sets his face against the established order such as the rather standard way of using accident statistics, against self-reports, well-known and widely accepted relationships such as exposure and accidents, against traffic conflict studies, and even experimental studies in simulators and instrumented vehicles.&nbsp

A holistic outcome-based approach to design healthcare systems

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Algorithmic opacity: making algorithmic processes transparent through abstraction hierarchy

In this paper we introduce the problem of algorithmic opacity and the challenges it presents to ethical decision-making in criminal intelligence analysis. Machine learning algorithms have played important roles in the decision-making process over the past decades. Intelligence analysts are increasingly being presented with smart black box automation that use machine learning algorithms to find patterns or interesting and unusual occurrences in big data sets. Algorithmic opacity is the lack visibility of computational processes such that humans are not able to inspect its inner workings to ascertain for themselves how the results and conclusions were computed. This is a problem that leads to several ethical issues. In the VALCRI project, we developed an abstraction hierarchy and abstraction decomposition space to identify important functional relationships and system invariants in relation to ethical goals. Such explanatory relationships can be valuable for making algorithmic process transparent during the criminal intelligence analysis process

Holistic outcome-based visualisations for defining the purpose of healthcare system

Various stakeholders in the complex healthcare systems often prioritise and pursue different purposes, values and outcomes. Understanding/sharing/negotiating the trade-offs between them is a critical action in the development and design of complex healthcare systems. Some approaches like work domain analysis or soft systems methodology attempted to map the complex interactions, but it remains unclear how those maps and visualisations are in line with how people conceptualise in practice. This study aims to explore how designers visualise complex system interactions using healthcare outcomes to define the purpose. A workshop was conducted with 23 designers to generate outcome-based visualisations. The results indicate that designers conceptualise the purpose of the healthcare systems in different ways. Complexity was expressed through organic circles and messy arrows. However, support elements are needed to conduct open visualisations. These results may play a role in developing a visualisation-based method to address the complexity of purpose definition in healthcare

Designing societal safety: A study of the Swedish crisis management system

Design is an activity aimed at solving an unsolved problem or improving an existing solution. In the area of societal safety, there are many activities that could be classified as design activities. For example when different actors are implementing measures to mitigate certain risk scenarios or when they are considering actions that could improve their capability to respond to various crises. We provide a descriptive study of how design problems are dealt with in the Swedish crisis management system. Our focus is on the risk and vulnerability analyses that are conducted annually by most Swedish authorities, and on efforts to improve various actors’ command and control capability. Within these two areas, both highly relevant for societal safety, we analyse how the actors address design problem using a framework inspired by design science. We present the results from a content analysis of all risk and vulnerability analyses (RVA:s) performed by the county administrative boards (regional level) in 2010 (there are 21 such boards in Sweden) and from 14 semi-structured interviews with representatives for various local and regional authorities in Sweden conducted in 2011. We conclude that when measures to reduce risk or improve crisis management capability are suggested in the RVA:s the context in which the measures are supposed to be useful in are not always described (including description of scenarios). Moreover, the effect of implementing the suggested measures are not explicitly described in any of the RVA:s. The results from the interview study indicates that leaving out or not describing important information explicitly when conducting design activities is not a phenomenon isolated to RVA:s but is also present when, for example, suggesting measures to improve command and control capability

How is capability assessment related to risk assessment? Evaluating existing research and current application from a design science perspective

Several countries use capability assessments as a part of their efforts to manage risk. However, it is unclear how such assessments are connected to other risk management activities, e.g. risk assessment. Therefore, the aim of the present paper is to present a study of how capability assessment is related to risk assessment. Capability assessment methods were identified through a scoping study and the Swedish capability assessment method was investigated through interviews with Swedish public actors and analysis of legislative documents. The data was analysed using a design science perspective. The results of the analysis show that the purposes presented for some capability assessment methods are the same or similar to purposes common to risk assessment methods, and the actual form of some of the methods is similar to existing risk assessment methods. Nevertheless, the relationship between capability assessment and risk assessment is unclear. We conclude that if capability assessments are going to continue to be an important part of risk management activities more research is needed to better establish the relationship between risk assessment and capability assessment