Introducing CHCI Workshop keynote speaker David Woods

CHCI has invited David Woods as the keynote speaker at the Eighth Annual CHCI Workshop on the Future of HCI, to be held Friday, March 22, 2024 in Gilbert Place, Blacksburg.

David Woods is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at the Ohio State University and Chief Scientist, Adaptive Capacity Labs. He is one of the pioneers of Resilience Engineering, which studies how people adapt to cope with complexity across different roles and organizations. His work highlights the dangers of dramatic failures due to increasingly brittle systems, such as accident investigations in critical digital services, aviation, energy, critical care medicine, disaster response, military operations, and space operations (advisor to the Columbia Space Shuttle Accident Investigation Board). 

As a scientist, Woods has discovered the key ingredients that allow systems to build the potential for resilient performance and flourish despite complexity penalties that accompany growth (his research has been cited @44K times). As a systems engineer, he shows organizations how to uncover and overcome points of brittleness and then how to build the capability for resilient performance when, inevitably, shock events occur (e.g., awards from Aviation Week and Space Technology, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society). His books include Behind Human Error, Resilience Engineering (the 1st book in the field), Resilience Engineering in Practice, Joint Cognitive Systems. He started the SNAFU Catchers Consortium, a software industry-university partnership to apply the new science to build resilience in critical digital services (see stella report). He is Past-President of the Resilience Engineering Association and Past-President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. He is frequently asked for advice by many government agencies and companies, domestically and abroad (e.g., DoD, NASA, FAA, IoM; Air France, TNO, IBM; UK MOD, NHS, Haute Autorité de Santé).

Keynote Title
The Future is Already Here and It’s Not as Advertised

Abstract

As new technology is developed and deployed, processes of growth and complexification are stimulated. New challenges arise; new versions of old challenges come to the fore; old challenges take on new urgency. As fields develop, conceptual lag sets in even as knowledge grows in the form of empirical generalizations, laws, and formal theories. The knowledge advances bring new light to challenges old and new, and provide new paths forward in understanding fundamentals and for pragmatic action. Current trajectories of technology change are but the latest cycles in continuing stories of growth, complexity, and adaptation.

Conceptual lag applies to challenges at the intersection of people, technology, and work as people take advantage of technology capabilities, leading to new complexities, new scales of operation, and new forms or joint and coordinated activity with new players, human and machine. Virtually all of the claims about the impact of new technology on human systems are stuck and stale in the face of the complexity penalties that accompany the new scale and extensive interdependencies of modern systems. All of the relevant lines of inquiry have fallen behind the pace of change (for the example of resilient infrastructures, see Woods & Alderson, 2021).

Ironically, trans-disciplinary work over the last 20 years has led to new findings about general patterns (e.g., three ways adaptive systems fail), empirical laws (e.g., Fluency Law; Law of Stretched Systems), proven theorems (e.g., Robust Yet Fragile; Perspective Bounds), and comprehensive formal theories about how human-technology adaptive systems function and malfunction at scale (The Theory of Graceful Extensibility; Diversity Enabled Sweet Spots).

This body of work on distributed & tangled layered networks made up of many human and machine roles has reframed the study of human systems. This body of work has had and is having a direct and practical impact in many areas. I will use one sector — critical digital services, how it underpins every sector, how it is exposed to brittle failures, and why it works at all — to illustrate the complex penalties that accompany growth (brittleness), the limits/ weaknesses of autonomy, and the findings about the essential role of adaptive capacity (graceful extensibility) to flourish despite the messiness of this universe.