This research project built on experience in aviation safety and applied that mindset to usability, using workshops and interviews to construct rich data on current design discovery practice in the UK, and applied reflexive thematic analysis to understand it. The analysis findings informed the design of a novel analysis method addressing the problem of how our designed user experiences can be made more resilient to use in unanticipated ways or for unexpected reasons. Its focus on the early design and user research activities, and earlier discovery of unwanted interactions, aims to support teams to be better primed for potential problems so that the inevitable surprises do not become shocks.

Working as mission systems evaluators, my team needed to understand new capabilities and identify the evidence needed to assess any potential airworthiness risks introduced. My responsibilities included coordinating between air force and industry colleagues to obtain relevant information, attending briefings and observing live flight test data, discussing findings with pilots, and analysing recordings to inform my own understanding and to communicate to the team. I planned the evaluation, setting out the risk-based goals to be met, and identified sources of information, before evaluating the evidence for each goal and assessing whether any further mitigation should be recommended. The full package of enhancements was subsequently approved for Release To Service, allowing older aircraft to be retired.

A collaborative European project coordinated by EUROCONTROL, the ACASA project used high fidelity simulation and probabilistic modelling to assess the impact on airborne collision avoidance systems of reducing vertical separation between air traffic flows. My role was to build and evaluate the first UK implementation of the ICAO standard encounter model, to gain experience in generating synthetic air-miss events, then work closely with our French partners to design and populate an equivalent model based on radar data from the UK and France, to better represent the characteristics of European airspace. Our work informed the decision to introduce Reduced Vertical Separation Minima (RVSM) airspace over Europe, making additional air traffic capacity available while maintaining safety.

A collaborative European initiative designed to develop future Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems, this programme included the prototyping of computer assistance for controllers and used real-time simulation demonstrators to measure the impact on their workload. My role in the first of these demonstrators was to design and build a tool to predict which aircraft would require controller intervention, and to collaborate with the human-computer interaction team to present the information in a usable way, so I observed ATM in operation at control centres and received basic ATM training to inform my design. The participants were serving controllers from around Europe, and we worked closely with colleagues in other countries. For a later demonstrator I was seconded to NLR in the Netherlands, to share our experience and help their team succeed too. The PHARE programme was an important step in modernising ATM to cope with increasing demand for travel while reducing delays and environmental impact.