Team and Shared Situation Awareness in Disaster Action Teams

Abstract

Disaster Action Teams assist with American Red Cross disaster relief operations by providing support and services to people who are affected by local emergencies, such as fire or water damage to a home. Ensuring the successful performance of these teams requires promoting not only the situation awareness (SA) of individual team members, but also the SA of the team as a whole as well as their shared SA. In this paper, we demonstrate how the Goal-Directed Task Analysis methodology can be utilized to identify the critical information requirements of Disaster Action Teams, at both the individual and team level. We also illustrate how SA-Oriented Design Principles can be applied to meet their information demands by effectively presenting these information requirements.