DISTRIBUTED COGNITION AND HUMAN FACTORS FAILURES IN OPERATING AND DESIGN PROCESSES

摘要

The principle of distributed cognition provides a promising framework for understanding the way that human problem solvers rely on the environment to accomplish their tasks. People rely on cues they receive from human co-workers, they make inferences from the appearance of the artefacts they work with, and they draw on organisational culture to work out what is expected of them. This distribution of cognition is vulnerable to particular kinds of failure, however, and such failure can occur both in the design of an installation and its subsequent operation. The purpose of this project is to use the distributed cognition principle both to help the designers of offshore installations reason about human factors connected with their designs and to help the same designers reason about how they should work effectively in collaboration with human factors specialists. We also wish to find out how such aspects of the designers' environment as safety regulation and safety management systems influence this distributed cognition. The aim is to develop two main products: a workbook for offshore design organisations to help them anticipate human factors failures, and a guidebook for regulatory organisations and senior industrialists on how the safety environment influences failures and limitations in designers' thinking.