Pattern of Life: Designing Threat Visualization for Continental Defence

Context

A pattern of life is a signature, a set of behaviours, routines, and activities that, when observed over time, become recognizable as normal for a person, a group, or a location. The absence of that pattern, or a change in it, can be equally significant. A neighbourhood that burns its trash rather than using municipal pickup may be following local custom, or may be concealing activity from external observation. Context is everything.

For operators responsible for continental defence, the ability to detect, analyze, and anticipate threats depends in part on their ability to identify meaningful patterns across multiple domains (air, land, and sea) and to recognize when those patterns shift in ways that matter. The challenge is not access to data. It is making sense of it.

This project was a direct research contract between Thales Digital Solutions and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) at the Valcartier Research Centre, focused on advancing the visualization and interaction design of patterns of life for threat anticipation and evaluation in a continental defence context.

The Challenge

Pattern of life visualization is an understudied area in UX. Unlike dashboards for known data types (financial metrics, network status, operational logs) patterns of life require operators to perceive meaning in behavioural data over time, across multiple contexts, and with significant ambiguity built in. A pattern is not an alert. It is an inference. Designing interfaces that support that kind of reasoning is fundamentally different from designing interfaces that display information.

There was very little existing UX literature or established design convention to draw from. The team had to build from first principles: reviewing what existed across adjacent fields, identifying the specific cognitive tasks operators needed to perform, and developing visualization and interaction concepts that could support those tasks without overwhelming operators with data they could not meaningfully act on.

The Approach

The project was structured as a research and conceptual design initiative, not a production deployment. The goal was to advance the state of knowledge and demonstrate what was possible, a foundation for future development.

The team included two UX designers (Louis-Philippe Bellerose and Audrey Marcotte), a system architect, and a project manager, with a third UX designer joining later to support the design phase. The work was conducted in close collaboration with DRDC researchers at the Valcartier Research Centre.

Literature Review

The first phase involved a comprehensive review of existing research on pattern of life analysis, visualization techniques from adjacent fields, and relevant interaction design principles. This review was conducted jointly by the UX and technical team members and resulted in a published DRDC report (DRDC-RDDC-2024-C044), establishing a documented knowledge foundation for the field.

Existing Components Review

The second phase surveyed existing visualization components and interaction patterns from related domains (situational awareness systems, intelligence analysis tools, traffic monitoring interfaces) to identify what could be adapted and what needed to be invented.

Design of Interactive Visualization Solutions

The third and most substantial phase focused on developing original visualization and interaction concepts. The team concentrated on specific domains (including air traffic) to ground the concepts in concrete operational scenarios rather than working at an abstract level.

The core design challenge was representing patterns in a way that allowed operators to perceive both the pattern itself and deviations from it and to understand the context that determined whether a deviation was significant. This required rethinking conventional data visualization approaches, which tend to display states rather than behaviours over time.

Prototype

The work culminated in an Axure prototype demonstrating the visualization and interaction concepts developed through the research and design phases.

What the Work Produced

The project produced a five-part report covering the full arc of the research:

• Literature review of patterns of life in threat anticipation and evaluation
• Survey of existing visualization components
• Design of interactive visualization solutions
• Implementation documentation
• Demonstration

The literature review portion was published as an official DRDC report (DRDC-RDDC-2024-C044), making it part of the permanent body of Canadian defence research.

The conceptual design work advanced the state of knowledge in an area with very little existing UX precedent — establishing visualization and interaction principles that operators could use to detect, analyze, and anticipate threats through behavioural pattern analysis across continental defence domains.

Deliverables

• Literature review published as DRDC-RDDC-2024-C044
• Existing components survey
• Interactive visualization concepts and design specifications
• Axure prototype demonstrating visualization and interaction solutions
• Five-part research report

Project period: September 2021 — March 2022
Client: Thales Digital Solutions
Purchaser: Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) — Valcartier Research Centre
Language of work: French and English