From One to Many, from Onsite to Remote: Control Rooms as Diverse Contexts of Use

In many contexts, control rooms are safety-relevant and, from the point of view of HCI research, complex socio-technical systems. This article first summarizes the contributions of the IFIP WG 13.5 Workshop at INTERACT 2023 entitled “On Land, at Sea, and in the Air: Human-Computer Interaction in Safety-Critical Spaces of Control”. The process and results of a group work phase during the workshop will then be discussed. A variety of examples (e.g. offshore operation centers, traffic light control rooms) and characteristics (e.g. level of automation, number of operators) in connection with control rooms were identified. Finally, it is pointed out that the diversity of usage contexts should not tempt us to lose sight of cross-domain perspectives, but rather to integrate them through appropriate levels of consideration.