Cues facilitating collective sensemaking during emergencies: Gaps, inconsistencies, and indicators

In emergency communications centers, call takers gather information from 9-1-1 callers which dispatchers then radio to first responders. This workflow changes, however, when communications specialists are introduced to work alongside call takers and dispatchers to make sense of information gathered from multiple physical and social sensors during emergencies. While the work of cross-functional communications teams stands to improve the timeliness and quality of situational awareness information dispatched to first responders, the sociotechnical requirements for collective sensemaking in next-generation emergency communications work remains understudied.

In this research-through-design study, a prototype dashboard and synthetic datasets were developed to examine how cues—informational features that prompt recognition and response—facilitated collective sensemaking among telecommunicators gathering information from 9-1-1 calls and social media during active assailant and flood emergency exercises. During these exercises, three types of cues—gaps, inconsistencies, and indicators—facilitated collective sensemaking by enabling the team to collaboratively assess and reassess incidents reported during the emergencies. However, these cues facilitated collective sensemaking only when paired with multiple resources and coordination mechanisms, including a common operational picture, domain ontology, and standard operating procedures, that allowed telecommunicators to recognize and respond to cues by seeking information to update and modify representations of events shared among members of the communications team. By theorizing cues as relationships between physical features of the environment and actors capable of recognizing and responding to these features, and conceptually defining types of cues that facilitate collective sensemaking, this study offers implications for the design of technologies and work organizations that support collective sensemaking processes.