Paper flight strips predate computer-based flight management systems. The flight strip system was designed and implemented well before any attempt was made to introduce electronic systems -- and indeed, those electronic systems have often emulated the use of paper flight strips.
However, air traffic controllers, in various countries, have expressed a considerable preference for paper-based flight strips over new digital systems. There are many reasons for this, and they are detailed in that chapter. One is that there is a set of very well developed practices associated with paper strips that must be re-learned for electronic systems, and in the meantime, until new practices emerge, electronic systems are less effective and therefore less safe. Another is that the paper strips capitalize upon physical opportunities for reconfiguration and local management (e.g. "cocking out" a strip to note a pending action which can then be observed at a glance) that electronic systems tend not to support. And a third is that the physical configuration of paper strips is easily available to *many* people at once, not just to a single controller, which supports collaboration. All these are detailed in the book chapter or in the papers that are cited there.
What's the point of this? It is to show that the question "is it less usable?" is a meaningless question unless we start to think about what usability *means*. In this case, usability consists in the support for local management and mutual awareness, amongst other things. So the electronic system might be exceptionally well designed, be graphically beautiful, and be interactially smooth, but still be less usable because of a series of INHERENT properties of physical objects. So please don't interpret this example as suggesting that an electronic system was designed badly so that people resorted to paper; try instead to look at the REASONS WHY and the WAYS IN WHICH a physically embodied system offered significant advantages over a purely digital system. The solution developed by Mackay and colleagues was not to replace paper with an electronic equivalent, but rather to let people keep on working with paper, but to use digital technologies to augment the paper-based system with elecronic information, in a similar way to the Digital Desk prototype we discussed before.
Paper flight strips predate computer-based flight management systems. The flight strip system was designed and implemented well before any attempt was made to introduce electronic systems -- and indeed, those electronic systems have often emulated the use of paper flight strips.
However, air traffic controllers, in various countries, have expressed a considerable preference for paper-based flight strips over new digital systems. There are many reasons for this, and they are detailed in that chapter. One is that there is a set of very well developed practices associated with paper strips that must be re-learned for electronic systems, and in the meantime, until new practices emerge, electronic systems are less effective and therefore less safe. Another is that the paper strips capitalize upon physical opportunities for reconfiguration and local management (e.g. "cocking out" a strip to note a pending action which can then be observed at a glance) that electronic systems tend not to support. And a third is that the physical configuration of paper strips is easily available to *many* people at once, not just to a single controller, which supports collaboration. All these are detailed in the book chapter or in the papers that are cited there.
What's the point of this? It is to show that the question "is it less usable?" is a meaningless question unless we start to think about what usability *means*. In this case, usability consists in the support for local management and mutual awareness, amongst other things. So the electronic system might be exceptionally well designed, be graphically beautiful, and be interactially smooth, but still be less usable because of a series of INHERENT properties of physical objects. So please don't interpret this example as suggesting that an electronic system was designed badly so that people resorted to paper; try instead to look at the REASONS WHY and the WAYS IN WHICH a physically embodied system offered significant advantages over a purely digital system. The solution developed by Mackay and colleagues was not to replace paper with an electronic equivalent, but rather to let people keep on working with paper, but to use digital technologies to augment the paper-based system with elecronic information, in a similar way to the Digital Desk prototype we discussed before.
Posted by: Paul Dourish | April 18, 2007 11:30 AM