Collaboration, Tool Use, and Work Practice of Mars Mission Scientists (14 May 2004)

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Collaboration, Tool Use, and Work Practice of Mars Mission Scientists (14 May 2004)
Before the MER rovers landed on Mars, our team spent three years doing research on and participating in the design of work process and tools for the mission. Pre-mission influences and tests were the basis for our assumptions when making recommendations for work process design and for our design decisions for certain mission tools. The activities and processes we have observed during the actual mission often did not match our expectations of what the work would look like. What did we miss in making our design decisions? Perhaps more importantly, what did we take as bedrock from our observation of pre-mission events that turned out to be subject to change during mission operations? Even with a great deal of user interaction/feedback and in-situ research, it remains challenging to get things right when designing tools and processes to a model of what we think events will look like as opposed to designing tools and processes for on-going operations. We will talk about the real-time mission drivers that affected and changed the MER mission. Focusing on the tools and work practice of the daily science analysis period, we will explore the confounding variables in our research.

Article URL: http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar/abstracts/03-04/040512-wales-vera.html

90.00

(Roxana Wales and Alonso Vera, NASA Ames)

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