Augmenting the Bird Table: Developing Technological Support for Disaster Response

The Orchid Project, in partnership with Rescue Global, is a collaborative project that drives the science of human-agent collectives to real-world applications in disaster response.During the 2014 Angel Thunder exercise in the USA, researchers from the Orchid Project embedded with Rescue Global to complete an ethnographic study (Fischer et al., 2015). The study analysed Rescue Global's decision-making process and how the team managed situational uncertainty through their manual tabletop planning work.As a result, the Orchid Project has formed a number of principles, which are now leading the development of a system, the ‘Augmented Bird Table’, which aims to facilitate greatly improved situational awareness by producing a “common operation picture” which informs command-and-control functions. This form of human-agent collective is based upon real needs established by the collaboration between academics and practitioners, and can therefore deliver real benefits in order to save lives in complex environments.