In the postmodern age, people interact with information on a daily basis. The process tends to become routinized. Yet, information has the potential to stimulate imagination, and the emergence of new ideas. We are endeavouring to open the space of everyday experiences with information. People need to create, work with, share, and present collections of information resources. Interactive systems can help them find information and see it in new ways. We are developing a mixed-initiative system, combinFormation, that uses composition for browsing, collecting, and arranging information samples from web pages. The samples act as visual, semiotic, and navigational surrogates for the documents from which they are extracted. The visual forms and meanings of the samples are connected through the composition to create recombinant information. The initiatives are the system’s generation of composition, and the user’s direct manipulation. The system’s generative initiatives-- collecting information samples, and

Walden's Paths is a suite of tools that supports the creation and presentation of linear hypermedia paths---targeted collections that enable authors to reorganize and contextualize Web-based information for presentation to an audience.

Mobile technologies, due to their ubiquitous nature, play an important role in supporting health care. However, it is not easy to design useful integrated mobile services without a systematic understanding of users, and this is especially true for children. Therefore, we propose a new theoretical perspective for generating design concepts in the early stage of the design process. Our ecological model is based on Ecological Systems Theory which approaches development in terms of the child’s relationships and environmental context. It leverages the fact that mobile technologies are deeply involved with users’ circumstances. We argue that the ecological model can provide a heuristic to help researchers understand users ’ needs in context and generate concepts logically and creatively. Here we explore pediatric asthma management as a case study for this model. Finally, five promising mobile technology concepts are provided as examples for further development of mobile technologies related to pediatric asthma management.