Remembering Pokémania: Memory, Cognitive Assemblages, and Augmented Reality

Introduced in July 2016, Pokémon GO is widely considered the killer app for contemporary augmented reality. Popular attention to the game has waned in recent years, but Pokémon GO remains enormously successful in terms of both player base and revenue generation. Whether individuals experienced the game for a short time or remain dedicated hardcore players, Pokémon GO exists as memories of time and place, imbuing familiar sites and routes with new meaning and temporal connection. Attending to these complex interrelationships of place, space, mobility, humans, technologies, infrastructures, environments, and memory, we situate Pokémon GO as what Hayles (2016) calls a cognitive assemblage—sociotechnical systems of interconnectivity in which cognition is an exteriorized process occurring across multiple levels, sites, and boundaries. In turn, we conceptualize cognition (and specifically memory) not as confined within a delimited hominid body, but instead operating through contextual relations, at multiple sites, and in a constant state of becoming. By reflecting on our own experiences as part of the distributed memory of Pokémon GO, we situate memory as momentary convergence of signals made possible by infrastructures, inscribed on servers and silicon, and made part of algorithmic suggestion and learning AI. Additionally, our own memories and experiences serve to highlight the experiential complexity of cognitive assemblages in relation to structures of feeling, as well as new temporal and spatial relations.

Adaptive Resilience of Complex Safety-Critical Sociotechnical Systems: Toward a Unified Conceptual Framework and Its Formalization

Resilience is commonly understood as the capacity for a system to maintain a desirable state while undergoing adversity or to return to a desirable state as quickly as possible after being impacted. In this paper, we focus on resilience for complex sociotechnical systems (STS), specifically those where safety is an important aspect. Two main desiderata for safety-critical STS to be resilient are adaptive capacity and adaptation. Formal studies integrating human cognition and social aspects are needed to quantify the capacity to adapt and the effects of adaptation. We propose a conceptual framework to elaborate on the concept of resilience of safety-critical STS, based on adaptive capacity and adaptation and how this can be formalized. A set of mechanisms is identified that is necessary for STS to have the capacity to adapt. Mechanisms belonging to adaptive capacity include situation awareness, sensemaking, monitoring, decision-making, coordination, and learning. It is posited that the two mechanisms required to perform adaptation are anticipation and responding. This framework attempts to coherently integrate the key components of the multifaceted concept of STS Equationsadaptive resilience. This can then be used to pursue the formal representation of Equationsadaptive resilience, its modeling, and its operationalization in real-world safety-critical STS.

Optimising the Performance of Complex Sociotechnical Systems in High-Stress, High-Speed Environments: The Formula 1 Pit Stop Test Case

In analysing the performance of complex sociotechnical systems, of particular interest is the inevitable and inherent variability that these systems exhibit, but can normally tolerate, in successfully operating in the real world. Knowing how that variability propagates and impacts the total function mix then allows an understanding of emergent behaviours. This interdependence, however, is not readily apparent from normal linear business process flow diagrams. An alternative approach to exploring the operability of complex systems, that addresses these limitations, is the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM). This is a way of visualising a system’s behaviour, by defining it as an array of functions, with all the interactions and interdependencies that are needed for it to work successfully. Until now this methodology has mainly been employed as a qualitative mind map. This paper describes a new development of the FRAM visualisation software that allows the quantification of the extent and effects of this functional variability. It then sets out to demonstrate its application in a practical, familiar test case. The example chosen is the complex sociotechnical system involved in a Formula 1 pit stop. This has shown the potential of the application and provided some interesting insights into the observed performances.

Government Actions and Their Relation to Resilience in Healthcare; What We See Is Not Always What We Get; Comment on "Government Actions and Their Relation to Resilience in Healthcare During the COVID-19 Pandemic in New South Wales, Australia and Ontario, Canada"

This commentary reviews the publication by Smaggus et al. published in the IJHPM in July 2021 on "Government Actions and Their Relation to Resilience in Healthcare During the COVID-19 Pandemic in New South Wales, Australia and Ontario, Canada" which analysed media releases to identify how governments contributed to Resilience in Healthcare (RiH). We suggest media releases might not be the best data to capture the mechanisms, activities and interactions through which government actions enhance or hinder RiH. RiH recognizes healthcare as a complex sociotechnical system, so studies into fostering capacity for RiH should be designed for complex sociotechnical systems. This means data should be derived from multiple sources to allow for diverse perspectives, and preferably include direct observations to capture the intricacies of backstage interactions.

Measuring the experience of remote home workers: A scoping review

Introduction: Working from home (WFH) remotely is a modality of working that requires the careful design of systems of rules and tools to enable people to exchange information and perform actions. WFH is expected to expand after the COVID-19 pandemic, and how best to reliably assess and compare the experience of workers with different (sociotechnical) systems of WFH is central to the diffusion of acceptable modalities of remote working. However, the concept of experience and how it can be measured in the domain in WFH is yet to be clearly characterized.Methods: Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology for scoping reviews, we systematically map the approaches used by researchers to assess WFH, identify which aspects are usually investigated, and examine how such aspects are usually measured in terms of questions and tools. Literature is collected using Scopus and Web of Science.Results: Thirty-four records out of 323 focusing either on validating a scale, presenting theoretically the experience of workers or testing this empirically are included in the qualitative synthesis. The results highlight a lack of unified terminology and tools, with assessments of workers’ experience mainly characterized by survey approaches and qualitative questions. Conclusion: Clustering together the most investigated aspects in the literature and reviewing how these aspects are assessed, we propose a list of 10 relevant overarching dimensions and attempt to define workers’ experience in the domain of WFH remotely. This definition can be used as a tool by researchers aiming to assess the experience of workers in order to inform the design or redesign of the sociotechnical systems that enable WFH.