Stéphane Chatty

Supporting air traffic control collaboration with a TableTop system

Collaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multi-user tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially-accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is actually usable by three people both in tightly coupled tasks and parallel, individual activities. At a higher level, we also found that co-location is not enough to generate mutual awareness if users are not engaged in meaningful collaboration.

Visual scanning as a reference framework for interactive representation design

When designing a representation, the designer implicitly formulates a sequence of visual tasks required to understand and use the representation effectively. This paper aims at making the sequence of visual tasks explicit in order to help designers elicit their design choices. In particular, we present a set of concepts to systematically analyse what a user must theoretically do to decipher representations. The analysis consists of a decomposition of the activity of scanning into elementary visualization operations. We show how the analysis applies to various existing representations, and how expected benefits can be expressed in terms of elementary operations. The set of elementary operations form the basis of a shared language for representation designers. The decomposition highlights the challenges encountered by a user when deciphering a representation and helps designers to exhibit possible flaws in their design, justify their choices, and compare designs. We also show that interaction with a representation can be considered as facilitation to perform the elementary operations. Categories and subject descriptors H.5.2 User Interfaces – evaluation/methodology, screen design. General terms design, human factors

Verification of properties of interactive components from their executable code

In this paper we describe how an executable model of interactive software can be exploited to allow programmers or specifiers to express properties that will be automatically checked on the components they create or reuse. The djnn framework relies on a theoretical model of interactive software in which applications are described in their totality as hierarchies of interactive components, with no additional code. This includes high level components, but also the graphics, behaviors, computations and data manipulations that constitute them. Because of this, the structure of the application tree provides significant insights in the nature and behavior of components. Pattern recognition systems can then be used to express and check simple properties, such as the external signature of a component, its internal flows of control, or even the continued visibility of a component on a display. This provides programmers with solutions for checking their components, ensuring non-regression, or working in a contract-oriented fashion with other UI development stakeholders.

Tangible augmented reality for air traffic control

Air traffic control procedures, skills, and systems have co-evolved over decades in a design process involving controllers, programmers, and paper/electronic technologies. Tangible interaction combined with augmented reality is well suited for supporting ATC. Developing these systems is challenging yet feasible. Tangible augmented interactors should be conceived of as continuous physical/virtual artifacts.

A descriptive model of visual scanning

When designing a representation, a designer implicitly formulates a sequence of visual tasks required to understand and use the representation effectively. This paper aims to make the sequence of visual tasks explicit, in order to help designers eliciting their design choices. In particular, we present a set of concepts to systematically analyze what a user must theoretically do to decipher representation. The analysis consists of a decomposition of the activity of scanning into elementary visualization operations. We show how the analysis applies to various existing representations, and how expected benefits can be expressed in terms of elementary operations. The set of elementary operations form the basis of a shared, common language for representation designers. The decomposition highlights the challenges encountered by a user when deciphering a representation, and helps designers to exhibit possible flaws in their design, justify their choices, and compare designs.

The accident of flight AF447 Rio-Paris: a case study for HCI research

On 2009, June 1st, flight AF447 from Rio to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The safety and legal investigations have concluded that human factors played an important role in the accident. Observing that a number of elements from the report written by the French Office of Investigations for Civil Aviation Safety may be assimilated to known concepts from HCI, we propose to use the report as a case study for HCI research. After introducing the aeronautical vocabulary required to its understanding, we extract the HCI-related elements from the report, and assimilate, organize and translate them into conceptual frameworks from the Model of Action and Epistemology. We hope to foster further research aiming at a more formal modeling of the accident, or to foster the identification of possible improvements of the onboard systems.

What should adaptivity mean to interactive software programmers

Works about adaptability and adaptivity in interactive systems cover very different issues (user adaptation, context-aware systems, ambient intelligence, ubiquitous computing), not always with the explicit goal of supporting programmers. Based on examples that highlight how weakly discriminative the present terminology is, we propose to separate two concerns: adaptivity as a purely analytical concept, relative to a given viewpoint on the software rather than to its very structure, and its programming as a non specific case of reactive behavior. We describe how simple adaptive behaviors can be programmed with simple interactive behavior patterns, and how more complex patterns can be introduced for intelligent adaptation. Finally we describe an application where, relying on the principles exposed in this paper, interaction and adaptation are combined in a simple and innovative manner.

Could tangibility improve the safety of touch-based interaction?: exploring a new physical design space for pilot-system interfaces

Touchscreen technologies will most probably replace current instrument panels in future aeronautical cockpits. However, while safety and performance require interactive instruments to maximize the perception, action and collaboration spaces offered to pilots, the literature highlights the limits of touch-based interaction regarding these aspects. Our objective is thus to explore how tangible embodied interaction (TEI), associated with a touch-based flight deck device, could address this issue. In this paper, we contribute a structured design space for pilot-system interactions based on an analysis of the design properties of physical interaction as described in the literature, and on relevant usability, safety and industrial requirements.

The accident of flight 447 Rio-Paris: a case study for HCI research

On June 1st, 2009 flight AF447 from Rio to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The safety and legal investigations concluded that human factors have played an important role in the accident. Observing that a number of elements from the report written by the French Office of Investigations for Civil Aviation Safety may be assimilated to known concepts from HCI, we propose to use the report as a case study for HCI research. After introducing the aeronautical vocabulary required to its understanding, we extract the HCI-related elements from the report, and assimilate, organize and translate them into conceptual frameworks from the Model of Action and Epistemology. We hope to foster further research aiming at a more formal modeling of the accident, or to foster the identification of possible improvements of the onboard systems.

Réconcilier conception d'interfaces et conception logicielle: vers la « conception orientée-systèmes »

Object-oriented design has failed to avoid a rift between interface design and software design, because the messages used in object-oriented poorly describe the interactions between between users and their environment. By relying on process theories and interactive component programming, one can propose a common language between designers: that of system-oriented design, in which they all describe interfaces between systems and design new systems.