**Situational awareness** is the ability to identify, assess, and organize around the variables present in a specific set of environmental conditions. It is an operational term most often used in rapidly evolving contexts such as military combat and disaster management, but can be applied to any environment that requires attention to shifts in details. I encountered during my career navigating ships under sail. It is effectively a means of responding appropriately to [[Range - David Epstein#Chapter 2 - How the Wicked World Was Made|wicked environments]]. Formally defined from an operational perspective, situation awareness is "the perception of elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their [[meaning]], and the projection of their status in the near future."[^1] As situation awareness as a topic of study is organized around rapid change, it may be considered in terms of discrete chunks of time, or moments, in which rapid cognition occurs in three steps:[^2] 1. *Perception* of the elements 2. *Comprehension* of their meaning 3. *Projection* of their status To this end, attention and working memory are emphasized as the primary limiting factors for an agent acquiring and interpreting information from their environment.[^3] Goals and mental models are hypothesized as heuristics for overcoming these constraints. In emergency services, situation awareness is organized around maintaining first responder safety and effectiveness while carrying out search and rescue operations. In transportation, it is centered on maintaining operational discipline, hazard avoidance, and incident prevention. In a combat setting, situation awareness is essential for maintaining [[battlefield control]]. [^1]: Endsley, M. R. (1988). Design and Evaluation for Situation Awareness Enhancement. Proceedings of the Human Factors Society Annual Meeting, 32(2), 97-101. [DOI](https://doi.org/10.1177/154193128803200221) [^2]: Endsley, M. R. (2016). Designing for Situation Awareness: An Approach to User-Centered Design, Second Edition. United Kingdom: CRC Press. [^3]: Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. _Human factors_, _37_(1), 32-64. [DOI](https://doi.org/10.1518/001872095779049543)