From Clansman to Bowman: HFI principles for NEC system design

Walker, Guy H., Stanton, Neville A., Jenkins, Dan and Salmon, Paul (2009) From Clansman to Bowman: HFI principles for NEC system design. The International C2 Journal, 3 (2), 1-33.

Abstract

As a consumer of advanced network enabled equipment the Military (like all consumers) has probably become used to a dominant design paradigm; the closed, bureaucratic, inflexible, complex, technology laden piece of kit which, despite all that, really only permits the user to perform simple and arbitrary individual tasks and often only then with arduous training and operational effort. This paper attempts to shift that paradigm. From the evolution of military equipment to its co-evolution with human users, from a focus on what equipment ‘is’ to what it actually ‘does,’ an argument for the application of systems principles to the type of equipment now found in network enabled domains is developed. This enables a set of initial propositions posed at the beginning of the paper to be elevated to the status of actionable design principles. Drawing widely from the domains of human factors and sociotechnical systems theory a case is thus put forward for equipment (and its procurement) to be as open, flexible, agile and self synchronizing as the net-enabled system into which it is designed to operate.

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Contributors

Author: Neville A. Stanton

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