Cultivating Resilience in Urban Firefighting: Supporting Skill Acquisition through Scenario Design

Abstract

Whether studying human cognition, designing new technologies, or exploring concepts such as safety and resilience, understanding decision making in natural settings is fundamental to Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE). Across all of these, it is crucial for human factors engineers to be able to create realistic scenarios of interest that hit upon “cognitive pressure points” (Woods and Dekker, 2000) to elicit challenges and observe patterns in cognitive work. Although many converging methodologies have provided a rich ecological body of practice-based research and application, there is a shortage of research demonstrating the efficacy of scenario-based design in support of skill acquisition. Based on continuing research with a major metropolitan fire department, the current paper reports initial findings from ongoing work analysis. From a series of scenarios, patterns of coordination challenges are discussed with implications for future emergency response operations and training.