It may well be this classic from my old office colleague https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Rich...

Thank you, his air traffic control paper was definitely one of the papers involved, but I couldn't quite remember the right name of the design field - "computer-supported cooperative work"[0] - so I failed to find it again. I also read few other ones, including one about the London underground that described a situation where these traffic controllers were both looking at their screens, but also constantly listening to their colleagues in their periphery. This let them adjust their strategies for handling emergencies on-the-fly as new information became known[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-supported_cooperative...

[1] http://www.academia.edu/download/48677152/Collaboration_and_...