We are indebted to Terry Winograd for suggesting the acronym "Oval " after hearing about the four components of our system and to John McDermott for suggesting the term "radically tailorable " as a description of the Oval system. The Oval system has benefited from the suggestions and work of numerous people over many years, including most recently: Mark

In today’s homes and schools, children are emerging as frequent and experienced users of technology [3, 14]. As this trend continues, it becomes increasingly important to ask if we are fulfilling the technology needs of our children. To answer this question, I have developed a research approach that enables young children to have a voice throughout the technology development process. In this paper, the techniques of cooperative inquiry will be described along with a theoretical framework that situates this work in the HCI literature. Two examples of technology resulting from this approach will be presented, along with a brief discussion on the design-centered learning of team researchers using cooperative inquiry. Keywords Children, design techniques, educational applications, cooperative design, participatory design, cooperative inquiry, intergenerational design team, KidPad, PETS. CHILDREN AS OUR RESEARCH PARTNERS Today’s technologies are becoming a critical part of our children’s daily lives [3, 9, 14]. From school learning experiences to after-school play, technology is changing the way children live and learn. In fact, children have been found to be an important new consumer group that must be satisfied as technology users [17]. In recent years, numerous methodologies have been developed that bring technology users into the development process. Users have been described as active partners [6, 16, 29], inspectors or testers [24, 25], or research participants to be observed and/or interviewed [5, 13, 18]. Thanks to user input, technology can be shaped and changed in ways that may be meaningful and useful for future technology users. While user involvement is well understood as important to the technology research and

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.

What are digital libraries, how should they be designed, how will they be used, and what relationship will they bear to what we now call “libraries”? Although we cannot hope to answer all these crucial questions in this short article, we do hope to encourage, and in some small measure to shape, the dialog among computer scientists, librarians, and other interested parties out of which answers may arise. Our contribution here is to make explicit, and to question, certain assumptions that underlie current digital library efforts. We will argue that current efforts are limited by a largely unexamined COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM April 1995/Vol. 38, No. 4 77 and unintended allegiance to an idealized view of what libraries have been, rather than what they actually are or could be. Since these limits come from current ways of thinking about the problem, rather than being inherent in the technology or in social practice, expanding our conception of digital libraries should serve to expand the scope and the

actually gets done, especially how people involve each other in their work. In particular, a model of practice reveals how people accomplish a collaboration through multiple and alternative means of communication, such as meetings, computer tools, and written documents. Choices of what and how to communicate are dependent upon social beliefs and behaviors---what people know about each other's activities, intentions, and capabilities and their understanding of the norms of the group. As a result, Brahms models can help human---computer system designers to understand how tasks and information actually flow between people and machines, what work is required to synchronize individual contributions, and how tools hinder or help this process. In particular, workflow diagrams generated by Brahms are the emergent product of local interactions between agents and representational artifacts, not pre-ordained, end-to-end p

This paper suggests a framework for understanding the roles that children can play in the technology design process, particularly in regards to designing technologies that support learning. Each role, user, tester, informant, and design partner has been defined based upon a review of the literature and my lab’s own research experiences. This discussion does not suggest that any one role is appropriate for all research or development needs. Instead, by understanding this framework the reader may be able to make more informed decisions about the design processes they choose to use with children in creating new technologies. This paper will present for each role a historical overview, research and development methods, as well as the strengths, challenges, and unique contributions associated with children in the design process.

The design of CSCW systems has often had its roots in ethnomethodological understandings of work and investigations of working settings. Increasingly, we are also seeing these ideas applied to critique and inform HCI design more generally. However, the attempt to design from the basis of ethnomethodology is fraught with methodological dangers. In particular, ethnomethodology’s overriding concern with the detail of practice poses some serious problems when attempts are made to design around such understandings. In this paper, we discuss the range and application of ethnomethodological investigations of technology in working settings, describe how ethnomethodologically-affiliated work has approached system design and discuss ways that ethnomethodology can move from design critique to design practice: the advent of technomethodology.

Human understanding in design evolves through a process of critiquing existing knowledge and consequently expanding the store of design knowledge. Critiquing is a dialog in which the interjection of a reasoned opinion about a product or action triggers further reflection on or changes to the artifact being designed. Our work has focused on applying this successful human critiquing paradigm to humancomputer interaction. We argue that computer-based critiquing systems are most effective when they are embedded in domain-oriented design environments, which are knowledge-based computer systems that support designers in specifying a problem and constructing a solution. Embedded critics play a number of important roles in such design environments: (1) they increase the designer's understanding of design situations by pointing out problematic situations early in the design process, (2) they support the integration of problem framing and problem solving by providing a linkage between the design...

In this paper, we look at how people working in a governmental labor inspection agency tailor their shared PC environment. Starting with standard off-the-shelf software, the tailors adapt that software to the particular workplace in which they are embedded, at the same time that they modify and extend the practices of that workplace. Over time, their adaptations and the tailoring processes themselves become structured and systematized within the organization. This tendency toward systematization is in part a response to the requirement that the results of tailoring be sharable across groups of users. Our study focuses on several dimensions of the work of tailoring: construction, organizational change, learning, and politics. We draw two kinds of lessons for system development: how better to support the work of tailors, and how system developers can learn from and cooperate with tailors. KEYWORDS: Tailoring, customization, emergent use of standard technology, development and use of sha...

As more information resources become accessible using computers, our digital interfaces to those resources need to be appropriate for all people. However when it comes to digital libraries, the interfaces have typically been designed for older children or adults. Therefore, we have begun to develop a digital library interface developmentally appropriate for young children (ages 5-10 years old). Our prototype system we now call "QueryKids" offers a graphical interface for querying, browsing and reviewing search results. This paper describes our motivation for the research, the design partnership we established between children and adults, our design process, the technology outcomes of our current work, and the lessons we have learned. Keywords Children, digital libraries, information retrieval design techniques, education applications, participatory design, cooperative inquiry, intergenerational design team, zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs). THE NEED FOR RESEARCH A growing body of k...