David D. Woods is an American safety systems researcher who studies human coordination and automation issues in a wide range safety-critical fields such as nuclear power, aviation, space operations, critical care medicine, and software services.
[4][1] From 1988 onwards, he served on the faculty of The Ohio State University in the Department of Integrated Systems, where he is currently a professor emeritus.
[1] In 2017, Woods co-founded a consulting company, Adaptive Capacity Labs, with Richard Cook and John Allspaw.
Effective operator interfaces should help figure out where to look next, and that navigating a virtual space of information could be improved by leveraging the human perceptual system has already been optimized to do, such as pattern recognition.
Woods proposed a number of concepts for improving the design of such interfaces by increasing the visual momentum: Woods studied the nature of operations work involved in identifying and mitigating faults in a supervisory context, such as controlling a power plant or operating a software service.