Excerpt from MoMA’s 2011 exhibition ‘Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects’:
The 911 Command Center is an emergency-response interface that helps dispatch critical resources more efficiently and with fewer errors. Unlike traditional interfaces, which present an overwhelming amount of high-stakes information with equal weight, [our] design uses color, animation, and relative sizing to make critical calls more prominent and render priorities intelligible at a glance. Active radio channels, for example, are animated to attract responders’ attention, and dormant channels are collapsed so that irrelevant data and functions do not distract. This new interface improves awareness, clarity, and accuracy in emergency response to such a great degree that [Houston] has already adopted it, as have various industries, such as airlines, that depend on mission-critical environments.
