David C. Morrell interview conducted by Anthony G. Potoczniak, 2012-07-31

David C. Morrell, born in 1957 in Humble, Texas, was educated in California, started his career at IBM, and returned to Houston in 1979. He has worked at the Houston Pilots at the Port of Houston since 1996. He describes the inspiration for the development of the pilot scheduling system for the Port of Houston called HarborLights, shares key moments from his career trajectory that would later be used in designing the system, and explains important details of day-to-day operations in the dispatch area.
Recorded at the Offices of the Houston Pilots Association, Deer Park, Texas, July 31, 2012.
Interviewer's note: The interviewer met with David Morrell several times to understand the HarborLights scheduling system. One particular characteristic of the interviewee that came across strongly throughout the interview was his insatiable curiosity about how processes worked. The underlying themes of his stories is a desire to improve or optimize systems. This is apparent especially in his involvement and development of HarborLights for the Houston Pilots. In his description of the revamped scheduling system, he incorporates several improvements into the system to improve a dispatcher's ability to interpret data. For example, in his attempts to improve data representation he tries to make logic of the colors. He made the tankers green, because they represented money; red represents emergency or hazardous materials, so when you take red and green and combine them, that makes a chemical tanker. In David Morrell's view, these schemes were designed within the commercial environment to be able to assess quickly the status of a ship.
Working the port of Houston: Archie Green Fellows Project, 2011-2012 (AFC 2012/006: 00335) Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
To honor the memory of Archie Green (1917-2009), a fellowship program was established at the American Folklife Center in 2010. Archie Green Fellowships support new research in the contemporary culture and traditions of American workers.
In English.