[eksith]

Your first step might be to visit NASA[1] and take a tour of what astronauts might go through. There's a lot to take in with regard to human psychology in stressful/critical situations. What may seem intuitive and obvious on the ground with your "normal" orientation (which means nothing in 0g) may feel completely different.

Try to walk in their footsteps to see how information should be displayed to them first. Then you can go on what that information might be.

It will be a feedback loop of constant improvement and you will need to tie a lot of that into the backend as well. There was a project called Open Flight Linux[2] which was an effort to duplicate the objectives of Flight Linux[3]. You may want to take a browse at the documentation to see what types of information would be useful to display.

You'll need some sort of existing reference to see what additional data can be pulled up.[4]

Edit: With regard to ChuckMcM's recommendation (which is very useful!) The NASA Tech Briefs should be on your path to glance at what might be in store for you.[5]

  [1] http://www.visitnasa.com
  [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20100306001043/http://openflightlinux.org
  [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20080102134626/http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/
  [4] https://www.google.com/search?&hl=en&tbm=isch&q=orbiter+cockpit
      https://www.google.com/search?&hl=en&tbm=isch&q=spaceshiptwo+cockpit
  [5] http://www.techbriefs.com/tech-briefs