The OCEAN project was launched in October 2022 and will run for 3 years. Co-funded by Horizon Europe and the European Union’s research and innovation programme, as well as the UKRI for the two UK partners, the consortium of 13 members represents 7 European countries, Norway, Greece, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland and UK, all located on major European coastal regions. Members include a coastal administration, a ship operator, maritime safety and transport researchers, marine mammal ecology and conservation experts, companies specialised in maritime information systems and sensors, a professional organisation, a risk and safety management organisation, as well as data infrastructure, data fusion and satellite imaging specialists.
In the first half of the project, the work agenda has been much at the foundational level. Literature studies and fundamental/enabling research has taken place across the more social-science oriented work packages, spanning subject areas ranging from the anatomy of undesired maritime incidents, and how these are seen as the results of complex chains of events, to the understanding of decision-making while in command of a large ship, leaning towards the naturalistic rather than the normative, to the insights into how organizations involved in development of navigational equipment is dealing with user needs and the context-of-use, ‘in real life’. Other facets include KPIs for the assessment and grading, and an investigation into good maritime training. 7 training videos have bee produced, and are free-to-use by anyone. In the more technically part of the project, initial definitions and basic design have taken place. The bits, pieces and components of the overall OCEAN data ecosystem are at this stage materializing and current assessment is that the overall framework of the OCEAN project will succeed. Many, like the OCEAN reporting app, the passive acoustic monitoring system, the automatic AI-based satellite image analysis function and the European Navigational Hazard Infrastructure (ENHI), are already in early stages of testing, and early data flows have been validated. The feasibility of connecting the OCEAN Evasive Manoeuvring Agent (EMA) to new and existing ship systems mostly using pre-existing shipboard interfaces and data streams has been demonstrated, and equally, tapping into the mandatory and standardized alert escalation mechanism on ships is by now both validated and demonstrated. The 4D-SAD display, targeting to be the first custom-designed maritime display focusing exclusively on providing and maintaining operator situational awareness, is also taking shape. The design is following a human-centred approach (HCD), and the collaborative effort between the ‘product’ designer and the project HF advisory is highly interesting from two different perspectives. Not only will the final product be confirmed to have the qualities designed for through validation with end-users, being a success in itself and demonstrating the power of HCD, following the work from a process perspective gives very valuable insights into the ‘cans’ and ‘cant’s’ in a modern industrial setting, and will eventually serve to guide other companies and organizations in the maritime equipment industry towards a practical way of using HCD.
