Development and Testing of a Ship Controller Interface - An Affective Engineering and Wayfaring Approach

Abstract

The ship bridge environment is complex and the task of navigating large vessels is a highly demanding task. This leads to a large responsibility resting on the officers shoulders, thus developers should aim to ease the crew members everyday working environment. In this thesis, Affective Engineering is combined with a Wayfaring approach to help develop a new controller interface and test aspects of inflicting nature on the captain s attention and mental resources. This is done through a pilot experiment setup measuring cognitive load of the user while interacting with a novel controller design. The new design proposed is a multifunction interface with dedicated input devices, substantially smaller than existing versions. Further statistical analysis of the recorded experimental data is performed, comparing the new design to one of old characteristics. The main intention with the work presented is to serve as a pilot for further introduction of Affective Engineering in maritime industry development. The experiment showed some tendencies towards possible solutions for measuring aspects of cognitive load, control device interaction and concept evaluation of a novel controller interface.