People, Places and Things: Leveraging Insights from Distributed Cognition Theory to Enhance the User-Centered Design of Meteorological Information Systems

At the same time as major constraints are being imposed on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s (BoM) resources there are rising levels of end-user expectations about the availability, quality and delivery of weather services. These circumstances have led to an increasing workload on forecasters and recognition within the BoM of the need to redesign the information systems used to support the forecasting process. The forecast streamlining and enhancement project (FSEP) aims to guide the development, design and implementation of the next generation of these information systems. Significantly, the FSEP project has recognized that these information systems must aim to support not just the specialized skill sets of forecasters, but also the interactions between them in the forecasting process. The need to thoroughly understand the weather forecasting process poses a major challenge for researchers due to the nature of the BoM’s working environment: How can understanding of the information requirements of forecasters be acquired without interrupting the continuous work of forecasting? Compounding this research challenge is the fact that many of the most critical information requirements arise in the cognitive interactions between forecasters and because a ‘key bottleneck’ for weather products remains the situated, embodied and distributed nature of the interactions used to generate