Designing Information Technology for Emergency Response
Jonas Landgren · Gothenburg University Publications Electronic Archive (Gothenburg University) · 2007
This thesis contributes to our understanding of information technologyuse in emergency response work and how information technology couldbe designed to provide support in emergency response work. The work domainof operative emergency response has been studied by extensive ethnographicfieldwork at several different fire and rescue services in Sweden.Prototypes have been design and used by fire crews in field experiments inorder to probe for potential future use of information technology and tostudy its consequences.By using sensemaking as an analytical lens, new aspects in emergency responsework have been identified that influence the design of informationtechnology support. The results from the extensive fieldwork and the fieldexperiments presented in this thesis suggest a new conceptualization of responsework as patterns of practice where the collective efforts of makingsense is fundamental for successful response work. The conceptualizationmakes visible the importance of carefully embedding the use of informationtechnology in the situated time-critical response work.Based on the patterns of practice, two general design dimensions havebeen formed, extending our current knowledge of how informationtechnology should be designed for emergency response work. Currentinformation technology has primarily been designed for a formal role orspecific task. The results presented in this thesis suggest that the design ofinformation technology should focus on the social interactions among theresponse actors involved in time-critical response work. In the collectiveefforts of making sense in emergency response, actors use a range of informationtechnology artifacts that produce a range of digital traces that saysomething about the ongoing work. Future information technology shouldbe designed to make use of such traces of actions in order to improve thevisibility of the actors and their actions in ongoing the response work.By designing for social interactions and designing for traces of actions,new improved features of information technology could be materializedthat will make emergency responders better equipped for sensemakingactivities in emergency response work.