Artifacts Use in Safety Critical Information Transfer: A Preliminary Study of the Information Arena

Highly skilled professionals in mission critical work domains communicate complicated, critical information, frequently under time pressure. For example, sustained operations require shift work, which results in hand-offs of responsibilities and need of information transfers. There is a growing interest to support their communications through advanced information technology. We observed usage of information artifacts in a pediatric intensive care unit to study information transfers to guide the design of support technology. In contrast to published studies, we examined the context of supporting environment that contains rich information sources gathered or tailored for verbal discourses. We called the supporting environment “information arena.” Clinicians prepare for their personal information arena as well as the shared information arena (e.g., paper notes, charts, mobile computers). Patterns of artifact uses during discourses revealed several distinct roles of artifacts, as well as constraints on design of such artifacts. For example, artifacts in shared information arena should be easily manageable to support fluid and dynamic conversation flow. We also uncover several potential future roles for information artifacts to support information transfer.