We live in a world characterized by evolution -- that is, by ongoing processes of development, formation, and growth in both natural and human-created systems. Biology tells us that complex, natural systems are not created all at once but must instead evolve over time. We are becoming increasingly aware that evolutionary processes are ubiquitous and critical for technological innovations as well. This is particularly true for complex software systems because these systems do not necessarily exist in a technological context alone but instead are embedded within dynamic human organizations. The Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L 3 D) at the University of Colorado has been involved in research on software design and other design domains for more than a decade. We understand software design as an evolutionary process in which system requirements and functionality are determined through an iterative process of collaboration among multiple stakeholders, rather than being completel...

Critiquing systems are a type of active, knowledge-based design support system. They propose to positively influence designers' cognitive processes by pointing out potential problems and contentious issues while designers work. To investigate the effects such systems have on the activities of professional designers, a design environment containing a critiquing system was designed, built, and evaluated for a specific area: phone-based interface design. Four professional designers were observed using the environment to solve realistic design tasks. Our protocol analyses indicate that such systems do influence the behaviour of designers, but often indirectly. Designers were observed anticipating the activity of the system and taking preventative steps to avoid it. Differential effects depending on the designers' level of domain experience were also observed. Overall, the system was better suited to the needs of highly experienced designers. Keywords : Critiquing Systems, Cognitive Ergono...

Self-directed learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring, applying and creating knowledge and skills in the context of an individual learner’s unique problems. Effectively supporting self-directed learning is one of the critical challenges in supporting lifelong learning. Self-directed learning creates new challenging requirements for learning technologies. Domainoriented design environments address these challenges by allowing learners to engage in their own problems, by providing contextualized support, and by exploiting breakdowns as opportunities for learning. Economies of educational knowledge constitute an emerging concept in which communities contribute toward the creation of information repositories, which can be reused and evolved by all members of the community for the creation of new environments. We argue and demonstrate that domain-oriented design environments can serve as models for these economies, that a software reuse perspective provides us with insights into the challenges these developments face, and that the creation and evolution of these economies are best understood as problems in self-directed learning. Keywords: Self-directed learning; lifelong learning; domain-oriented design environments; economy of educational knowledge; reuse; seeding, evolutionary growth, reseeding Demonstrations: A demonstration of the WebNet system described in this article can be found at

A fundamental objective of human-computer interaction research is to make systems more usable, more useful, and to provide users with experiences fitting their specific background knowledge and objectives. The challenge in an information-rich world is not only to make information available to people at any time, at any place, and in any form, but specifically to say the right thing at the right time in the right way. Designers of collaborative humancomputer systems face the formidable task of writing software for millions of users (at design time) while making it work as if it were designed for each individual user (only known at use time). User modeling research has attempted to address these issues. In this article, I will first review the objectives, progress, and unfulfilled hopes that have occurred over the last ten years, and illustrate them with some interesting computational environments and their underlying conceptual frameworks. A special emphasis is given to high-functionali...

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Wisdom is not a product of schooling, but the lifelong attempt to acquire it. Einstein Learning can no longer be dichotomized into a place and time to acquire knowledge (school) and a place and time to apply knowledge (the workplace). Todays citizens are flooded with more information than they can handle, and tomorrows workers will need to know far more than any individual can retain. Lifelong learning is an essential challenge for inventing the future of our societies; it is a necessity rather than a possibility or a luxury to be considered. Lifelong learning is more than adult education and/or training it is a mindset and a habit for people to acquire. Lifelong learning creates the challenge to understand, explore, and support new essential dimensions of learning such as: (1) self-directed learning, (2) learning on demand, (3) collaborative learning, and (4) organizational learning. These approaches need new media and innovative technologies to be adequately supported. A theory of l...

This paper describes theories and computer systems illustrating two innovative models of computer support for integrating working and learning. The VDDE system illustrates the design critiquing model helping individual professionals in analyzing current work situations, applying existing knowledge to these situations, and articulating new knowledge. The SmartMedia system illustrates the domain construction model helping communities of practice to collaboratively evolve new ways of working. KEYWORDS: Communities of Practice, Critiquing, Design Environments, Domain Construction, Workplace Learning. NATURE OF WORKPLACE LEARNING Workplace learning is fundamentally different from traditional school learning (see Table 1). Empirical studies of professional practice, by ourselves and others [12, 13, 17, 18], show that while the focus is primarily on getting the job done, learning is inextricably intertwined with working. Specifically, in order to do their job, professionals must continuall...

Abstract. We are looking at how new forms of document interface can be used to support new forms of scholarly discourse, and ultimately, new models of scholarly publishing. Towards this end, we have been using specially designed computer-mediated conferencing technology to realize an innovative peer review

Taxonomies are a well-established instrument for organizing and accessing resources in Information, Content and Knowledge Management (ICKM) systems. Furthermore, they contribute to a common understanding and an improved communication in the user community by fostering the development and usage of a shared vocabulary. In addition to these operational usage scenarios, we argue in this paper that a taxonomy is also a valuable medium in system design. We present a meta-design framework for systematically supporting the user in the setup, customization and evolution of Web-based ICKM system instances, which is based on a model-based domain construction approach. Taxonomies are exploited both as the fundamental basis for the construction process itself and as the principal support for context-driven access to the common metamodel in this framework implementing the ontological commitment underlying the complete framework. These manifold forms of taxonomy exploitation are supported by a flexible taxonomy component that enables multiple classifications of arbitrary resources, effective taxonomy management, and context-adaptive taxonomy reduction in our ICKM meta-design framework. 1.

How can new media positively transform scholarly practices? One possible way is for scholarly archives such as e-journals and digital libraries to better support the needs and practices of their users, instead of the publishing process. This paper examines what it might mean to promote cognitive and social aspects of `scholarship' through innovative archive design. Design requirements for supporting both scholarly tasks and scholarly communities are derived by analyzing existing cognitive and social theories. A promising theoretical framework guiding archive design is introduced: the contextually-enriched document framework. This framework suggests that: (1) document interfaces should enable practitioners to progressively enrich documents with important contextual information arising from social processes and (2) archive managers should engage in proactive practices to facilitate use and assist practitioners in realizing the benefits of the new technology. Both the design requirements ...