Combining conscious and unconscious knowledge within human-machine-interfaces to foster sustainability with decision-making concerning production processes

At present, sustainability science is mainly based on conscious information and strongly focused on analytical tools or strategies. Neuroscience has made obvious that human decisions are prepared by the unconsciousness. Intuition plays an important role in early and late stages of learning processes and has a crucial impact on decision-making. Thus, intuitive and unconscious thinking is crucial for management processes in general and production planning processes in the main. However, unconscious knowledge and human behaviour is predominantly neglected in production research. Especially the addressing of human machine interfaces (HMI), human cognitive biases have a crucial impact on decision making processes. Constellation work is based on unconscious knowledge and intuition. Thus, systemic structural constellations are an innovative tool to integrate unconscious knowledge in a research context. In systemic structural constellations specific foci of complex systems, such as a production system, can be simulated and represented through spatial arrangements of persons or symbols. So, the method was used to reveal relevant patterns of relationships, structures, interaction, implicit knowledge, including hidden or underlying dynamics and influences that are relevant to and within a production system to understand how the raised problems in HMI can be better solved. The guiding research question is: How can the use of structural systemic constellations improve decision-making processes in HMI contexts in production environments in order to increase sustainability? Results show sustainability seems to be a matter of consciousness and is closely linked to the bias group not enough meaning. Sustainability and complexity resemble more than being linked by trade-offs. The recognition of human biases can be trained to improve human-machine-interfaces and sustainability. Constellation work contributes to decision theory by supporting effectuation. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.