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. Although the EDC framework is applicable to different domains; our initial effort has focused on the domain of urban planning (specifically transportation planning) and community development. Permission to make digital / hard copy of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and / or a fee. Categories and INTRODUCTIONHuman-computer interaction (HCI) research over the last 20 years has made fundamental contributions to the creation of new paradigms and new forms of working, learning, and collaborating in the information age. Its major emphasis has been to develop new technologies (e.g., at the hardware, basic software, and application levels), new interaction techniques (e.g., graphical user interfaces), and new design approaches (e.g., usercentered, human-centered, work-oriented, and learner-centered design). Much of this research has emphasized and pioneered socio-technical approaches. In the process, HCI work has progressed from early concerns with low-level computer issues to a focus on people's tasks [Myers 1998;Newell and Card 1985;Norman 1990]. The greatest progress in HCI research has been made at the operator and task level, where events are studied in time scales ranging from microseconds to minutes (and in some cases hours or days). At these time scales, the relevant theory is drawn from psychology ...

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 client and a prompting script configuration tool for caregivers; and c) a monitoring system that collects real-time task status from the mobile client and alerts the support community of potential problems. We then describe a phased community-centered assessment approach that begins at the design stage and continues to be integrated throughout the project.This research has broad implications for designing more human-centered transportation systems that are universally accessible for other disenfranchised communities such as the elderly or nonnative speaker. This project presents an “in-the-world” research opportunity that challenges our understanding about mobile human computer interactions with ubiquitous, context-aware computing architectures in noisy, uncontrolled environments; personalization and user modeling techniques; and the design of universally accessible interfaces for complex systems through participatory design processes.This article provides both a near-term vision and an architecture for transportation systems that are socially inclusive, technologically appealing, and easier for everyone to use.

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The involvement of changes in sympathetic activity, changes in cardiac efferent vagal activity, and nonautonomic mechanisms in producing the rise in heart rate (HR) during heat stress-induced hyperthermia was studied in seven unanesthetized, chronically instrumented baboons (Papio anubis and P. cynocephalus). The experimental protocol consisted of subjecting the baboon to environmental heating (EH) of sufficient intensity (40-45 degrees C) to raise arterial blood temperature (Tbl) 2-3 degrees C in 1-2 h while in one of four states: 1) normal (control), 2) beta-adrenergic receptor blockade induced by propranolol, 3) cholinergic receptor blockade induced by atropine, and 4) combined beta- and cholinergic receptor blockade induced by propranolol and atropine together. HR rose linearly with Tbl during EH in all four states (correlation coefficient greater than or equal to 0.97 in all cases) with average HR-Tbl regression coefficients (slopes) being 20.5 +/- 1.2 (SE) beats X min-1 . degrees C for the normal state, 12.2 +/- 0.5 beats X min-1 . degrees C-1 for the beta-blockade state, 13.3 +/- 1.1 beats X min-1 . degrees C for the cholinergic blockade state, and 8.4 +/- 0.8 beats X min-1 . degrees C-1 for the combined beta- and cholinergic receptor blockade state. Thus nonautonomic mechanisms account for about 40% of the tachycardia in heat-stressed baboons with the remaining 60% produced by combined vagal withdrawal and sympathetic activation. Furthermore application of a multiplicative model of autonomic control of HR to these data suggests that about 75% of the autonomic component is produced by vagal withdrawal.