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.

The nature of cognition is being re-considered. Instead of emphasizing formal operations on abstract symbols, the new approach foregrounds the fact that cognition is, rather, a situated activity, and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings. The essay reviews recent work in Embodied Cognition, provides a concise guide to its principles, attitudes and goals, and identifies the physical grounding project as its central research focus.

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We identify a problem with the process of research in the HCI community -- an overemphasis on "radical invention" at the price of achieving a common research focus. Without such a focus, it is difficult to build on previous work, to compare different interaction techniques objectively, and to make progress in developing theory. These problems at the research level have implications for practice, too; as

Activities are located behaviors, taking time, conceived as socially meaningful, and usually involving interaction with tools and the environment. In modeling human cognition as a form of problem solving (goal-directed search and operator sequencing), cognitive science researchers have not adequately studied "off-task" activities (e.g., waiting), non-intellectual motives (e.g., hunger), sustaining a goal state (e.g., playful interaction), and coupled perceptual-motor dynamics (e.g., following someone). These aspects of human behavior have been considered in bits and pieces in past research, identified as scripts, human factors, behavior settings, ensemble, flow experience, and situated action. More broadly, activity theory provides a comprehensive framework relating motives, goals, and operations. This paper ties these ideas together, using examples from work life in a Canadian High Arctic research station. The emphasis is on simulating human behavior as it naturally occurs, such that "working" is understood as an aspect of living. The result is a synthesis of previously unrelated analytic perspectives and a broader appreciation of the nature of human cognition. Simulating activities in this comprehensive way is useful for understanding work practice, promoting learning, and designing better tools, including human-robot systems.

This paper reports and extends discussions carried out during a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute in August 1995 by the authors. It treats eight major topics: (i) the importance of carefully examining research on routine, (it) the concept of 'action patterns ' in general and in terms of routine, (Hi) the useful categorization of routines and other recurring patterns, (iv) the research implications of recent cognitive results, (v) the relation of evolution to action patterns, (vi) the contributions of simulation modeling for theory in this area, (vii) examples of various approaches to empirical jj; research that reveal key problems, and (viii) a possible definition of 'routine'. An m extended appendix by Massimo Egidi provides a lexicon of synonyms and opposites ji covering use of the word 'routine ' in such areas as economics, organization theory and z artificial intelligence. 6

this paper we focus on this sort of stabilization, first of all because it has been neglected (in comparison with learning and more straighforward considerations in agent design), secondly because we believe that the notion can play a central role in understanding the successes of habitual human behavior, and, finally, because it seems like an unexploited research area in the analysis and design of agents that have a long-term interaction with their environments. For the rest of the paper, we explore the idea of stabilization, and its use in the design of agents and in the analysis of agent-environment interaction. Finally we describe FixPoint, an program that implements some of these ideas, and some performance improvement results due to the stabilization of

Context appears in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a challenge for the coming years as shown by the various scientific events focusing on context held since 1995. However, context is already considered in other domains, such as Natural Language Processing, although through few aspects of context. We present in this paper a survey of the literature dealing directly and explicitly with context whatever the domain is. This permits us to have a clear view of the context in AI. One of the conclusions of this survey is to point out the existence of different types of context along knowledge representation, the mechanisms of reasoning on the knowledge, and the interaction of the computer system with humans.

Although PDAs typically run applications in a "standalone " mode, they are increasingly equipped with wireless communications, which makes them useful in new domains. This capability for more powerful information exchange with larger information systems presents a new situated context for PDA applications, and provides new design and usability evaluation challenges.