Is it really better to share? Distributed situation awareness and its implications for collaborative system design

Abstract

Despite well over two decades of academic research, situation awareness in complex collaborative environments remains ambiguous. Recent systems-based models of distributed situation awareness have attempted to address this; however, further effort is required in clarifying exactly how situation awareness operates in complex socio-technical systems. One pertinent issue regards what the ‘distributed’ situational picture looks like from the perspective of each component of the system and how it differs amongst team members. Is the same picture ‘shared’ across team members, or do they have different, but compatible, views on the situation? This article tackles this question by presenting a distributed cognition-inspired systems-based model of situation awareness in collaborative systems, along with an accompanying modelling approach, the propositional network methodology. Following this, the paper focuses explicitly on the model's sub-concept of compatible situation awareness and uses case study evidence to demonstrate how awareness is distributed between, and differs between, team members. This view is then compared to existing team situation awareness views and the implications for collaborative system design are discussed.