Integrated Science Lab

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that  produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state"  —Herb Simon

Design thinking is a common term given to a particular approach to ideate possible courses of action and to curate those ideas to create a novel approach to a situation. As Simon points out, design takes place in contexts far removed from industrial design. In many of these domains design must be done in collaboration with diverse stakeholders, and must take into account ethical, legal, and operational constraints as well as the values of the stakeholder communities. In these contexts design takes on a complexity that goes well beyond design thinking as it is commonly used.

SCIENCElab studies the psychology of design— ideation, curation, negotiation, and evaluation— in a broad range of applications. We have worked in business, health care, aircraft safety, and command, control and interoperability for emergency management. Our work begins with observation of ideation and decision-making “in the wild”, by analysts, leaders, and operational staff in organizations. We then build and adapt graphical information systems to support the cognitive operations that create and evaluate solutions in organizations and society. These information systems integrate data analytics as part of the decision-making process, using interactive data visualization to enable human analysts, stakeholders, and decision-makers to dialog with data and computational processes (e.g. AI agents) in their work.

The approach comes out of visual analytics, “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces”. We apply this approach to work with government, industry, and scientific and technical associations.
 

Design of these information systems must be informed by both psychological science and computational analytics. To do this we are integrating cognitive science and design science to create information systems for data-intensive analysis, decision-making, and operational management. This integrated science must be precise enough to effectively guide technology builders and interaction designers. It should also guide organizations to adopt new processes and support new ways of training data scientists and their collaborators and managers. Our work often begins when a cognitive ethnographer is embedded with the decision-makers in the environment in which they work— in the field, office, etc.-- taking field notes, and recording audio/video These papers are reviewed by experts in the application area to confirm their accuracy and sometimes in applied social science venues to confirm methodologies.

Based on those reports we use a cognitive engineering approach to develop information systems that better support knowledge workers s to use data more effectively in their organizations. These systems are evaluated "in the wild" with field experiments that record interaction between a visual analytics trained data scientist and one or more subject matter experts as they conduct a data analysis, make an informed decision, and come to an agreement about a course of action. Video and keystroke analysis of this joint activity is mined to build a design language of cognitive processes and methods by which they can be shaped by dynamic and interactive visual information systems. These papers are reviewed by experts in information system and computer technology.



We may also do laboratory studies and field experiment testing on specific aspect of the interface to determine how analysts process information contained in those visualizations and how they concieve of and execute queries using the interface. These studies extend distributed cognition and visual cognition theory and methods to focus on how interactive visual information systems shape thinking. The papers are reviewed for psychological/cognitive science and HCI conferences.

For more information about the methods we use, please look at Pair Analytics, Visualization Literacy, Personal Equation of Interaction, and Distributed Collaborative Analytics in the methods section of the menu.

For more information about specific applications, please look at the projects that can be found under Health analytics, Aircraft Safety, Emergency management, and Public Safety submenu.