[ACT-R-users] risk driven spiral model book with models in its core

[Frank Ritter]

Dear all,

I helped write a book this past year on human-system design, and I 
thought you should know about it.   It's an engineering book about 
reducing risk in system design by knowing users and their tasks, and 
ways to know users and tasks.  We thought this book and its 
recommendations can even be helpful in improving system design.  It 
is sympathetic to work on user modeling in ACT-R and Soar, and cites 
some of that work, and uses user models (both runable and static) as 
a central but not always named construct -- where it says 'shared 
representation', we sometimes mean cogntive user model or user model. 
I thought you might like to know about it as an extension of modeling 
and a nice survey about how to study users.

Citation:
Committee Human-System Design Support for Changing Technology. (2007).
A new approach to system design using risk in human-system integration
Richard W. Pew and Anne S. Mavor, editors. National Research Council, 
National Academy Press. Washington D.C.

An Executive summary is at
http://books.nap.edu/execsumm_pdf/11893.pdf

I attach a summary with the blank pages removed, and a paragraph 
summary that I've just written to hold this together.

I believe that if you write to Anne, she can get people in the US 
government copies of the book
"Mavor, Anne" <AMavor at nas.edu>, otherwise you can either buy it or 
read it a page a time for free from 
http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11893

cheers,

Frank


"A new approach to system design using risk in human-system integration", by
Richard W. Pew and Anne S. Mavor, editors, proposes a new approach to 
system design based on reducing risks in design and use, broadly 
described.  It reduces risk through an iterated design process, that 
attempts to identify risks, and then reduce them through greater 
understanding of the process or that part of the system.  The report 
provides details on this process, and also details on tools and 
methodologies for increasing understanding of system use, users, and 
context.  It concludes with recommendations to improve system 
development.  These recommendations include easier to use tools and 
methods, better shared representations of users and their tasks,and 
better education for people involved in the system and system 
development, including education for system designers about the wide 
range of risks.

The book should be useful to designers of large systems that can take 
time to study the design process (this book may make suggestions to 
their practice), managers of designers, broadly defined, including 
chief technical officers and military officers at the flag level (who 
may wish to suggest changes to design processes in their 
organizations, and may wish to be aware of a wider range of risks and 
ways to reduce them, and may wish to implement some of the 
recommendations for practice), researchers and educators of design 
(who may find areas to extend, refine, and improve this work), and 
research funders interested in design (who may wish to support work 
addressing the research recommendations).



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