Full title

Situation modelling

Keywords

Situation Modelling, Ethnography, Design, Dependability.

Summary

When designing any socio-technical system it is vital that information about the proposed environment be gathered. In any given situation the amount of information available is vast and is not always considered necessary to be passed on to designers. Some of this information is presented to the designers, in the form of design specifications or requirements documents, however, these documents only contain a limited amount information in a relatively disconnected way. There are many ways in which to gather this information one of which is ethnography. Through ethnographic studies it is possible to gain a much richer insight into the interactions and elements of a given situation, the raw information gathered is, more often than not, presented in the form of a report. This information can have many other applications in informing stakeholders about the environment. It’s this is the information which, given to designers, could help inform them about different aspect of any given situation and also help to avoid bad design decisions that may otherwise occur due to lack of situation knowledge.

In order to make sense of the information available through ethnographic studies it is important to present the data in a way that suits the intended audience. The audience we are focussing on is designers, the intentions being to pass on raw data in a form that is familiar to them. As mentioned earlier, this type of information is usually presented in the form of a report in order to try and make sense of all of the snippets of information, this is not a form that designers are used to, having to read through pages and pages of text to get to a single piece of information. Similarly, it would loose a lot of the richness of the data if a rigid structure was imposed on such information and so a set database would not present the information in a useful way. Situation Modelling is a way of loosely linking pieces of information together to provide a way of walking through all of the snippets whilst at the same time allowing the richness of the data to remain.

Situation Modelling is made up of three basic models that are designed to incorporate all possible information about any given situation. The notion of viewpoints is something that has transpired from the way in which ethnographic studies are carried out. The first viewpoint is from a task point of view, that is to follow a single task and see what is involved, the interactions and the people and the documents e.g. to follow the task of ward management. The second viewpoint is from a role aspect, that is to follow a roll within a situation and examine the interactions with other rolls and with tasks and possibly any tools or existing systems that are there, e.g. a doctor. The third viewpoint is from an artifact aspect, e.g. to follow a medical record. Using these viewpoints the three basic models were developed. The main model is based on the task viewpoint and starts of with a wide element called a stream, this may focus on something such as ward management and incorporate elements that become quite detailed in order to represent, for example, the examination of a particular patient in a particular state. The three models can be used along side each other to allow different windows of access to the data. By giving designers access to this information in a way that is more familiar to them, will bring them closer to the proposed environment of the system.

Situation Modelling can be used in any situation in which a socio-technical system is intended to be place and also for a situation in which there is an existing system that is going to be updated or replaced. The first step is to carry out an ethnography of the situation in question, this will produce a great deal of raw data that is rich in contextual information. The next step is to put this information into a database using the situation models, as the amount of data is vast and not necessarily of a digital format, this can be a very time consuming and tedious task. Scavenger (insert link) as described above, is an excellent way of sorting and importing data, handling most types of media, it allows a much more accurate and speedy dissection of raw ethnographic data. Using the Situation Models XML schema have been written and Scavanger will use these an produce XML documents that follow the format of the situation models. The documents contain the name of the element, the type of element, the links to related elements and links to the vignettes containing the examples of the various aspects of the situation.

A Medical Example

This example starts off in the stream of Ward management which is an ongoing process. In order to accomplish this, certain activities must take place, in this case, Bed allocation and Ward rounds. These are both ongoing activities, but they can be identified as having a beginning and an end. They can be split into daily activities, or shift activities that require a summary at each new shift change. The next step of the information looks at events, these are smaller still tasks e,g., Examining an patient, or Signing out a patient. These are momentary events, that contribute to the activities of Ward Management. Sometimes the activities need to be carried out in an order so errors do not occur, e.g. a patient must be examined before they can be released. The explanations and the vignettes are aids to explaining further the nature or differences between instances of an event.

Links

Ethnography

Ethnography and design

Papers

Mackie, J. “Situation Modelling Ethnography and Design” - DIRC/AMASE workshop April 2002, Lancaster.

Mackie, J and Lock, S. “Supporting the Development of Healthcare Systems through Situation Modelling” - the 3rd International Conference on the Management of Healthcare and Medical Technology, Coventry, 7-9 September 2003

Author

Jo Mackie (Lancaster)