41 Effect of Map Sharing and Confidence Information in Situation-Map Making Lucy Gunawan, Hani Alers, Willem-Paul Brinkman Delft University of Technology Man-Machine Interaction Group Delft, The Netherlands {l.t.gunawan, h.e.b.al-ers, w.p.brinkman}@tudelft.nl Mark Neerincx Dutch Institute of Applied Science TNO Human Factors Soesterberg, The Netherlands mark.neerincx@tno.nl ABSTRACT Motivation – A situation map that shows the overview of a disaster situation serves as a valuable tool for disaster response teams. It helps them orientate their location and make disaster response decisions. It is, however, a quite complicated task to rapidly generate a comprehensive situation map of a disaster area. In this paper, we report on an investigation of how two persons can collaborate to make a situation map. Research approach – We performed a controlled laboratory experiment, in which 32 participants (grouped into 16 pairs) made a situation map of incidents. The experiment was set up as a two-way repeated-measures design with the type of collaboration and the availability of confidence level information as within-subject factors. Findings/Design – The results suggest that the collaboration type can affect the quality of the situation map. Additionally, the results also suggest that the availability of confidence information influences the discussion process during collaboration. The participants perceived the availability of confidence level information as being positive. Research limitations/Implications – The order of using the types of collaboration might have caused a learning effect by participants. Furthermore, the lack of a practice session might have had an influence on participants’ object recognition during the first session of the experiment. Originality/Value – The study takes the position that the affected population in a disaster can actively participate in the situation-map making process. Take away message – Situation map-making might benefit from a simple collaborative action such as sharing a map including confidence information. Keywords Collaboration, sensemaking, situation mapping, disaster response, map sharing, situation awareness. INTRODUCTION After a disaster impact, such as earthquake or flooding, where infrastructure is devastated, the extent of the damage needs to be continuously analyzed in order to understand the conditions on the ground. This is necessary as a key component of naturalistic decision- making, where decisions and actions in the dynamic environment are based on the available information. The process of familiarizing, analyzing, understanding and keeping track of what is going on, is known as sensemaking, and the outcome of this action is situation awareness (Klein, Moon, & Hoffman, 2006). A situation map is one form of situation awareness as the product of the sensemaking process. This map serves as a tool to see the overview of the disaster situation based on geo-spatial information at a particular time. It may contain information indicating whether an area is safe, a road network is passable, a place is destroyed, etc. It can also indicate the locations of evacuation shelters and emergency facilities. This information is needed so that emergency services and supplies can be mobilized. Unfortunately, due to lack of resources to collect and assemble complete situation information, it is usually not trivial to construct this kind of map. Learning from the mass-casualty disasters in the past, overwhelmed local emergency services and limited emergency facilities are some of the biggest problems faced immediately after these disasters struck. In order to overcome this problem, one of the possibilities is to find potential resources and then to support them to gather situation information collectively and continuously. Research conducted by disaster sociologists suggests that the population affected in a disaster can be considered as a potential resource instead of helpless victims, since they are still capable human beings during disaster situations (Drabek & McEntire, 2003; Dynes, 1994; Quarantelli, 1999). If we examine the numbers of natural disasters over the last thirty years, we see that the affected people who are neither killed nor injured in the disaster are the majority of the group, accounting for about 90% of the affected population (Guha-Sapir, Hargitt, & Hoyois, 2004). We can therefore argue that by supporting the affected population with simple technology, a collective effort may improve and expedite the process of constructing a high quality situation map compared to traditional collection methods. Proceedings of ECCE 2010 Conference, 25 – 27 August 2010, Delft, The Netherlands Copyright is held by the author(s)/owner(s)