A theoretical note on the relationship between work domain analysis and task analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to clarify the theoretical relationship between work domain analysis and task analysis, two classes of techniques that have been used by cognitive engineers to identify information requirements for systems design. The transformation from a work domain analysis to a task analysis (i.e., from a description of the object of control to a description of control itself) can be conceived as a discrete set of transformations. Work domain analysis identifies the set of all structural degrees of freedom that are available to any actor. Only a subset of these will be relevant for a particular context. At any particular point in time, actors will have to choose which of these relevant degrees of freedom to utilize. Finally, the utilized degrees of freedom will have a dynamic state that can usually be described quantitatively. Task analysis is the function that maps current states onto desired states via a set of human or automated control actions. By making these transformations explicit, the relevance of work domain analysis to worker (or automation) goals and actions becomes more clear.

Keywords:

• Work domain analysis
• task analysis
• abstraction hierarchy
• cognitive work analysis

Acknowledgements

This research was sponsored in part by the Jerome Clarke Hunsaker Distinguished Visiting Professorship from MIT, by a research grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and by Honeywell International.

About the authors

John R. Hajdukiewicz received a PhD (2001) in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He is currently Principal Research Scientist at Honeywell's Advanced Technology Laboratories in Minneapolis. He is also a research lead of the ASM® consortium (http://www.asmconsortium.org). With Catherine Burns, he co-authored Ecological Interface Design, published by CRC Press (Taylor & Francis).

Kim J. Vicente received a PhD (1991) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently Jerome Clarke Hunsaker Distinguished Visiting Professor of Aerospace Information Engineering at MIT; Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto; founding director of the Cognitive Engineering Laboratory there; and a licensed professional engineer in Ontario. His latest book, The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live With Technology, will be published by Knopf Canada in 2003.