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Chapter 4
Discovery as Functional
Synthesis
Doing a cognitive task analys is is like trying to learn the s ecret of a
magic trick: once you know the trick and know what to look for, you
see things that you did not notice when you did not know exactly what
to look for.
Paraphrase of Orville Wr ight’s comment
about discovering the s ecret of flight
(Woods, 2003)
“BEING BUMPABLE” AS AN EXAMPLE OF
STUDYING A JCS AT WORK
The synthes is of cognitive system functions in the ICU was built around the
practitioner term bumpable, and it reveals much about dis covering patterns in JCSs
at work. To tell the story o f the cr itic al incident and put it in context, the account of
how ICUs function is full of details, described in domain terms. But the selection
of what ...