Parts of a whole: First Sketch of a Block Approach for Interaction Pattern Elements in Cooperative Systems

Current complex socio-technical systems are in need of transparent communication between stakeholders and the technical system. Even more so, interaction becomes a key aspect to form cooperative systems like highly automated driving. In order to facilitate such interaction, common procedures and interaction patterns help to solve known repeating interaction problems. Interaction patterns have been extensively researched in recent years. They provide the benefit to standardize and describe an interaction activity between a human and a technical system. Previous forms of describing these interactions follow a somewhat open format, which increases the difficulty when reusing the proposed pattern, besides making the pattern’s representation at times too complex, which further hampers its reusability. This paper proposes a more flexible, semi-standardized approach to describe patterns for human machine cooperation. This method analyzes the interaction and groups the actions of both the human and the technical system into “interaction blocks”. These interaction blocks can then be re-arranged to adapt the interaction design to new applications or be reused and combined with other blocks to form new patterns. This paper sketches the concepts, and presents a couple of examples, which further demonstrate the benefit of using and designing an interaction with a pattern as a base.