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Technological and organisational advances have increased the potential for remote access and proactive monitoring of the infrastructure in various domains and sectorswater and sewage, oil and gas, and transport. Intelligent Infrastructure (II) is an architecture that potentially enables the generation of timely and relevant information about the state of any type of infrastructure asset, providing a basis for reliable decision making. This paper reports an exploratory study to understand the concepts and human factors associated with II in the railway, largely drawing from structured interviews with key industry decision makers and attachment to pilot projects. Outputs from the study include a data processing framework defining the key human factors at different levels of the data structure within a railway II system and a system level representation. The framework and other study findings will form a basis for human factors contributions to systems design elements such as information interfaces and role specifications. Practitioner summaryThe framework reported in this paper can become the basis for human factors guidance of engineers, developers and business analysts in developing appropriate levels of information display, automation and decision aid into rail II. Guidance will be aimed at the different functions and activities within multi-layered, multi-agent control.

This paper reports on a community-based project to collaboratively research, design and test an integrated digital crisis planning tool for youth ages 13 to 24. Research goals included understanding: what crisis means to the target group and what strategies they employ for coping with crisis; the ways youth in crisis are most likely to communicate; how new technologies can help deliver the services youth need. The project was established with several guiding principles: that students should act as the front line researchers and designers with the guidance of faculty and community partners; that we should aim to move beyond consultation to truly participatory design methods involving end-users in needs identification, idea generation, design development and testing; and that by having the students interface with the end-users, we would alter the power balance by building trust and avoiding a top-down approach.

Rail disruption management is central to operational continuity and customer satisfaction.Disruption is not a unitary phenomenon -it varies by time, cause, location and complexity of coordination. Effective, user-centred technology for rail disruption must reflect this variety. A repertory grid study was conducted to elicit disruption characteristics. Construct elicitation with a group of experts (n=7) captured 26 characteristics relevant to rail disruption. A larger group of operational staff (n=28) rated 10 types of rail incident against the 26 characteristics.The results revealed distinctions such as business impact and public perception, and the importance of management of the disruption over initial detection. There were clear differences between those events that stop the traffic, as opposed to those that only slow the traffic. The results also demonstrate the utility of repertory grid for capturing the characteristics of complex work domains. Practitioner SummaryThe aim of the paper is to understand how variety in rail disruption influences socio-technical design. It uses repertory grid to identify and prioritise 26 constructs, and group 10 disruption types, identifying critical factors such as whether an incident stops or merely slows the service, and business reputation.

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