Complex design problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses because the knowledge relevant to a problem is usually distributed among stakeholders. Bringing different and often controversial points of view together to create a shared understanding among these stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. New media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and resolving complex design problems can extend the power of the individual human mind. Based on our past work and study of other approaches, systems, and collaborative and participatory processes, this article identifies challenges we see as the limiting factors for future collaborative human-computer systems. The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is introduced as an integrated physical and computational environment addressing some of these challenges. The vision behind the EDC shifts future development away from the computer as the focal point, toward an emphasis that tries to improve our understanding of the human, social, and cultural system that creates the context for use. This work is based on new conceptual principles that include creating shared understanding among various stakeholders, contextualizing information to the task at hand, and creating objects to think with in collaborative design activities.

Domain-oriented design environments are cooperative problem-solving systems that support designers in complex design tasks. In this paper we present the facilities and architecture of Argo, a domain-oriented design environment for software architecture. Argo’s architecture is motivated by the desire to achieve reuse and extensibility of the design environment. It separates domain-neutral code from domain-oriented code, which is distributed among intelligent design materials as opposed to being centralized in the design environment. Argo’s facilities are motivated by the observed cognitive needs of designers. These facilities extend previous work in design environments to support reflection-in-action, opportunistic design, and comprehension and problem-solving. Keywords: Domain-oriented design environments, critics, software architectures, architectural styles, humancomputer interaction, human cognitive skills.

One fundamental challenge for the design of the interactive systems of the future is to invent and design environments and cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from a perspective of viewing and treating humans primarily as consumers. The possibility for humans to be and act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of “high-tech scribes, ” but rather to all interested individuals and groups. Meta-design characterizes activities, processes, and objectives to create new media and environments that allow users to act as designers and be creative. In this paper we discuss problems addressed by our research on meta-design, provide a conceptual framework for metadesign, and illustrate our developments in the context of a particular system, the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory.

Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities. An interdisciplinary team of HCI researchers, urban transportation planners, commercial technologists, and assistive care specialists are now collaborating on the Mobility-for-All project to create architectures and prototypes that support those with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers. We have grounded our research and design efforts using a distributed cognition framework. We have derived requirements for our designs by analyzing “how things are ” for individuals with cognitive disabilities who learn and use public transportation systems. We present a socio-technical architecture that has three components: a) a personal travel assistant that uses real-time Global Positioning Systems data from the bus fleet to deliver just-in-time prompts; b) a mobile prompting

Software development remains mentally challenging despite the continual advancement of training, techniques, and tools. Because completely automating software development is currently impossible, it makes sense to seriously consider how tools can improve the mental activities of developers apart from automating them away. Such mental assistance can be called “cognitive support”. Understanding and developing cognitive support in software engineering tools is an important research issue but, unfortunately, at the moment our theoretical foundations for it are inadequately developed. Furthermore, much of the relevant research has occurred outside of the software engineering community, and is therefore not easily available to the researchers who typically develop software engineering tools. Tool evaluation, comparison, and development are consequently impaired. The present work introduces a theoretical framework intended to seed further systematic study of cognitive support in the field of software engineering tools. This theoretical framework, called RODS, imports ideas and methods from a field of cognitive science called “distributed cognition”. The crucial concept in RODS is that cognitive support can be understood and explained in terms of the computational advantages that are conferred when cognition is redistributed between software developer and their tools and environment. The name RODS, in fact, comes from the

Complex design problems require more knowledge than any one single person can possess, and the knowledge relevant to a problem is often distributed and controversial. Rather than being a limiting factor, symmetry of ignorance can provide the foundation for social creativity. Bringing different points of view together and trying to create a shared understanding among all stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. Social creativity can be supported by new media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and solving these problems. These new media need to be designed from a meta-design perspective by creating environments in which stakeholders can act as designers and be more than consumers. Keywords conceptual frameworks for creativity and cognition, consumers, designers, impact of new media on design, meta-design, social creativity, symmetry of ignorance Gerhard Fischer 2 KBS Special Issues C&C99 INTRODUCTION______________________________________...

With the recent advances in mobile computing, distributed organizations are facing a growing need for advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that support mobile working. The ability to use information effectively anywhere and anytime has become a key business success factor. Although many Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) systems have been introduced to date, technologies and architectures that support the collaboration of nomadic workers on a wide range of mobile devices, notebooks and personal computers is still a challenge. The MObile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION) 1 project is aiming to design a highly flexible, open and scalable ICT architecture for mobile collaboration. In this paper, we present the mobile collaboration requirements of two MOTION industry case studies, and highlight the advantages of a Web-based peer-to-peer architecture and for nomadic working. Keywords: MOTION, Mobile Teamworking, Information and Communication Technology Architecture, Mobile Computing, Web-based Peer-to-Peer Architectures, Nomadic Working 1

Software architectures are useful, in part, because they use the appropriate level of abstraction to support the design of complex systems. Software architecture research has quickly evolved to the degree that design environments have been implemented to support software architects in creating new designs. We report on a software architecture design environment named Argo that differs from other approaches by paying attention to the human, cognitive needs of software architects, as much as to the representation and manipulation of the architecture itself. We emphasize the primary considerations by contrasting the human cognitive design process to the systems-oriented software design process. Human-centered features in Argo focus on the application of critics for providing design feedback, design processes for supporting critics, and multiple architectural perspectives for aiding human designers.

The paper presents an approach for the dynamic generation of a complex structure of personalized web pages for learning purposes, reflecting the ontology of the considered domain. The need of assuring a holistic character for the body of knowledge induced in the learner's mind is emphasized. This is very important in the learning processes, especially nowadays, in the context of the huge amount of information available on the web and of its permanent evolution. The approach permits the adaptation of the content of the generated web pages to the incoming information from the web. New information is extracted, annotated and coherently integrated in the body of knowledge in order to keep the holistic character of the body of knowledge. Personalization is achieved by filtering the semantic network according to the learner model, which keeps the list of concepts known or unknown by the learner. The approach was used in an EU INCO Copernicus project for computer aided language learning.

Abstract: This chapter describes different script types that are involved when a person X is accomplishing a particular task Y. We refer to concepts and ideas from distributed cognition theories. It is assumed that individuals are holding internal scripts that guide them in the way they process tasks they are faced with, and these internal scripts are standing in a complex relationship to the external scripts provided by an artifact or by other persons. Three factors are regarded as crucial in order to describe the accomplishment of a task, namely (a) the actual activity, (b) knowledge underlying the activity, and (c) the executive function, a (meta-)cognitive instance that is setting the goals for the task and controls the system’s task accomplishment. For each of these three main factors, several sub-categories are introduced, on which two script approaches are compared. The first approach represents the socio-technical environment Memory Aiding Prompting System (MAPS) designed to support individuals with cognitive disabilities in accomplishing everyday tasks with a focus on “tools for living”. The second approach, the so-called collaborative argumentation script, represents a computer-supported collaborative inquiry learning environment to facilitate students ’ collaborative argumentation with a focus on “tools for learning”. Implications of the comparison for the design of external scripts are derived and directions for future research are discussed. 1.