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First Lecture

I attended my first lecture for the module Design, Development, Creativity yesterday and I found it fascinating and I am very much looking forward to engaging with the module over the course of the semester.

What stood out for me from yesterday's lecture was the activity we carried out in small groups on Buxton's avalanche case. The case described an event whereby friends skiing got caught in an avalanche and one of their friends, Saul was missing.

During their avalanche training, the friends were given instructions on which of their survival tools (probe, shovel, transmitter) to use in which order and how to go about the rescue triage (rescuing the most able individuals first before moving on to the least able).Having not followed the sequence of  their training in exact order, the group of friends still managed to save Saul within 10minutes.

What stood out for me from this exercise was the fact that systems are complex entities which comprise of many independent factors linked together. In the case of the avalanche, it was a mixture of tools, training and trust which led to Saul being rescued safely.

The exercise also taught me that although systems often have pre-defined instructions or rules for use, humans may not always see fit follow the rules correctly, meaning that systems need to be flexible and be able to adapt to human factors and unforeseen events. In this particular case, had the friends followed their training correctly, they may not have saved their friend in time.

The case also led me to reflect on the human versus machine debate and the notion of machines being able to out-smart humans. One wonders whether the friends knew that following the rules correctly would have led to an unsuccessful rescue of their friend Saul and so they used their intuition as well as the training they had learned to save their friend rather than relying on the training alone. Had they relied on the rules alone, they may not have been as successful in their rescue efforts.

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