XR for Shared Situation Awareness: Design Thinking and Industrial Application

In automation-intensive industrial environments, maintaining shared situation
awareness across mixed fleets of human and machine agents presents a complex
design challenge. Effective solutions must be cognitively grounded, role-sensi-
tive, and aligned with socio-technical constraints. This thesis addresses this chal-
lenge by developing a design thinking framework through a design science re-
search process to guide the development of extended reality applications for sup-
porting situation awareness. The framework integrates theories of individual,
shared, and distributed situation awareness with a life-based design approach to
ensure alignment with users’ cognitive capacities, roles, and operational contexts.
Empirical material from the intralogistics domain informed the development of
the framework by providing insights into challenges related to situation aware-
ness and contextual constraints in mixed fleet operations. These findings were
translated, through the structuring logic of life-based design, into concept-level
interventions and narrative scenarios that illustrate how extended reality can
structure and deliver situation-relevant information in complex operational con-
texts. The resulting framework offers structured guidance for designing solutions
that are cognitively appropriate and contextually compatible for supporting sit-
uation awareness in human–technology collaboration. While developed in the
context of intralogistics, the framework is intended to be applicable to other au-
tomation-intensive domains where coordination between human and machine
agents is critical. The study provides a theoretically grounded and empirically
informed foundation for both future research and the design of extended reality–
based support systems in complex socio-technical environments.