Handy navigation in ever-changing spaces - An ethnographic study of firefighting practices

Abstract

This paper presents an ethnographic study, conducted to gain an insight of the practices around navigation of firefighters on the first line of intervention. We argue that the common approach of looking only at the technical aspects is incomplete. We show instead, that navigation of firefighters in ever-changing spaces is a collective craft or art, where technology is only one of the relevant pieces, but not the only one. Therefore design should take a deep look at existing navigation practices of firefighters. In order to identify relevant work practices, we conducted our ethnographic study to find out patterns of navigation work and based on our findings, we provide an outline of how the navigation practices can be supported by ubiquitous computing. Copyright 2008 ACM.