Design of Tools in Fire Management

The contribution of the paper is twofold. We introduce the concept of fire as a chaotic and complex system through the Overworld FIRE project as a case study by demonstrating how a Decision Support System (DSS) could contribute in organising firefighting teams and operations. We reflect on the lack of data and information accessibility for the decision makers involved in the system and address this issue through an interdisciplinary design-oriented process. By discussing the results of the visualisation of the data and information flow during firefighting operations, DSS primary users and their data needs are identified and two user task-oriented interfaces have been designed and prototyped.