In the MOOD for Citizen Psych-Science

People make funny, frustrating and fatal errors on a daily basis. People can also create and apply strategies to avoid and mitigate error – this is called cognitive resilience. Researchers at UCLIC started the Errordiary project in 2009 as a way of raising awareness of human error research. Errordiary (www.errordiary.org) is an online public repository of the errors people make and the cognitive resilience strategies that they use. People contribute to it by using the #errordiary #rsdiary hashtags through Twitter. Over 130 people have contributed so far. The project has allowed researchers to gain a better insight into the resilience strategies that people use (Furniss et al., 2012). It has also been used as a real-life data set for teaching students about the psychology of human error (Wiseman, 2012). During August 2013 we interviewed 8 Errordiary contributors (5 female, 3 male) to find out more about their motivations for taking part. Most of our participants described their contributions as “occasional”, where Errordiary contributions varied from once a week, once a month, to once every 6 months. As one participant describes, “I go through a period of not contributing for weeks and then remembering it exists.” One reason for this is that contributions are event-driven. People cannot contribute whenever they wish - it has to be once they’ve committed an error or used a resilience strategy. Some participants described forgetting to contribute. Those that were regular twitter users were more likely to remember. As one participant describes, “I was already sharing errors on Twitter, now it’s just adding a hashtag.” The content of the error also had an impact on contributions. Sometimes participants did not tweet an error because they thought others might view their contribution as “mundane” or “not funny.” Contributions are visible to a person’s Twitter network, which means they are visible to a volunteer’s followers that may not know about the project. This makes contributing to Errordiary quite different to most other citizen science projects, where people contribute within the “safety” of being among like-minded others who share their interests. A couple of participants even described how they had set up a separate Twitter account just for the purpose of contributing to Errordiary. This highlights an important issue in using Twitter for data collection, as volunteers make a trade-off between convenience and protecting their privacy. These findings also highlight some of the ways in which a citizen psych-science project differs from a typical citizen science project. In citizen science usually volunteers collect or analyse data related to their environment (Haklay, 2013). However in Errordiary, researchers are asking volunteers to contribute their experiences of error. This means that volunteers are helping to collaborate in research, but at the same time they are the participants of the research. We suggest that this makes contributing to Errordiary more personal, and perhaps more sensitive, compared to other projects. The risks associated with sharing errors (e.g. negative perceptions from others, being viewed as incompetent) may counteract a person’s general good will to help researchers. Overall our study reveals several interesting insights concerning the spectrum of citizen science, and pros and cons in using Twitter for data collection. The Errordiary project is currently changing from being an online archive of error to a hub to engage and learn about error. This includes a ‘Discovery Zone’, allowing volunteers to explore research, media and games related to errors. It is now also possible for volunteers to login and contribute via the website – so the project is no longer restricted to Twitter users only. We plan to explore how these changes impact volunteers’ experiences in future research. References: Furniss, D., Back, J. and Blandford, A. (2012). Cognitive resilience: Can we use Twitter to make strategies more tangible? Proceedings of ECCE 2012, 96-99. Haklay, M. (2013). Citizen science and volunteered geographic information: Overview and typology of participation. In D. Sui et al. (Eds.) Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge: VGI in Theory and Practice, pp.105-122. Springer Netherlands. Wiseman, S. (2012). Errordiary: Support for teaching human error. ‘A contextualized curriculum for HCI’ workshop at CHI 2012

Organisational reporting and learning systems : innovating inside and outside of the box

Reporting and learning systems are key organisational tools for the management and prevention of clinical risk. However, current approaches, such as incident reporting, are struggling to meet expectations of turning health systems like the UK National Health Service (NHS) into learning organisations. This article aims to open up debate on the potential for novel reporting and learning systems in healthcare, by reflecting on experiences from two recent projects: Proactive Risk Monitoring in Healthcare (PRIMO) and Errordiary in Healthcare. These two approaches demonstrate how paying attention to ordinary, everyday clinical work can derive useful learning and active discussion about clinical risk. We argue that innovations in reporting and learning systems might come from both inside and outside of the box. ‘Inside’ being along traditional paths of controlled organisational innovation. ‘Outside’ in the sense that inspiration comes outside of the healthcare domain, or more extremely, outside official channels through external websites and social media (e.g. patient forums, public review sites, whistleblower blogs and Twitter streams). Reporting routes that bypass official channels could empower staff and patient activism, and turn out to be a driver to challenge organisational processes, assumptions and priorities where the organisation is failing and has become unresponsive

Designing Better Prescription Charts: Why we can’t just ask the nurses

Prescription charts are not designed with the task of programing medical devices in mind. This is surprising because we know that charts need to be consulted for programing values. This paper summarizes what we know about chart design, and then reflects on what we do not know. In order to design charts that facilitate programing, we need a better understanding of how they are used in hospitals. We cannot only ask nurses about how they use them since they may omit information about context and clinical practice. We discuss approaches that we plan to use to obtain the required understanding

Modelling Distributed Cognition Systems in PVS

We report on our efforts to formalise DiCoT, an informal structured approach for analysing complex work systems, such as hospital and day care units, as distributed cognition systems. We focus on DiCoT's information flow model, which describes how information is transformed and propagated in the system. Our contribution is a set of generic models for the specification and verification system PVS. The developed models can be directly mapped to the informal descriptions adopted by human-computer interactions experts. The models can be verified against properties of interest in the PVS theorem prover. Also, the same models can be simulated, thus facilitating analysts to engage with stakeholders when checking the correctness of the model. We trial our ideas on a case study based on a real-world medical system

The Role of Story Cards and the Wall in XP teams: a distributed cognition perspective

Much of the knowledge used within an XP team is tacit, i.e. it is hidden and intangible. Two tangible artefacts that carry information about the team’s work are the index cards which capture stories and tasks to be implemented and the wall where they are displayed (which we refer to as the ‘Wall’). It is widely acknowledged that these are key elements supporting the work of the XP team, but no systematic investigation of their role has been reported to date. In this paper, we focus on the use of these artefacts within one XP team. We use distributed cognition, a framework for analysing collaborative work, to explicate the information flows in, around and within the team that are supported by the index cards and the Wall. We then interrogate the models produced using this analysis to answer ‘what if’ questions

The future of textiles sourcing: exploring the potential for digital tools

Textile selection involves aspects of objective function and subjective experience. While technical assessments of textiles are extensively supported by standards and machinery that provide the industry with rigorous specifications, the more subjective characteristics remain heavily reliant on designers’ tacit knowledge, experience and intuition. In this paper, we present a study that investigated designers’ textile sourcing activities and if and how digital tools could provide support. The study was conducted in a textile fair with an expert audience in the mind-set of sourcing. An existing digital tool that allows textiles manipulation was introduced to familiarise participants with the digital context and enable conversations on the future of textiles sourcing. We also look at the implications of adopting digital tools for their activities including a transition to more sustainable practices. The results raise awareness of designers’ use of experiential information to support textiles sourcing, besides highlighting requirements for designing future digital tools