Andrew Gorman

Transcending the individual human mind—creating shared understanding through collaborative design

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.

Socio-technical environments supporting people with cognitive disabilities using public transportation

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.

Increasing Workplace Independence for People with Cognitive Disabilities by Leveraging Distributed Cognition among Caregivers and Clients

This paper describes a group configuration that is currently employed to support the everyday living and working activities of people with cognitive disabilities. A client receiving face-to-face, often one-to-one, assistance from a dedicated human job coach is characteristic of this “traditional” configuration. We compare it with other group configurations that are used in cooperative and distributed work practices and propose an alternative configuration titled active distributed support system. In so doing, we highlight requirements that are unique to task support for people with cognitive disabilities. In particular, we assert that the knowledge of how to perform such activities is shared not only among people, but also between people and artifacts. There is a great potential for innovative uses of ubiquitous and mobile technologies to support these activities. A survey of technologies that have been developed to provide these individuals with greater levels of independence is then presented. These endeavors often attempt to replace human job coaches with computational cognitive aids. We discuss some limitations of such approaches and present a model and prototype that extends the computational job coach by incorporating human caregivers in a distributed one-to-many support system.

Toward an analytic framework for understanding and fostering peer-support communities in using and evolving software products

The fundamental challenge for social computing is to contribute to fostering communities in which humans can transcend the limitation of the unaided,individual human mind by helping each other.Going beyond antidotal examples requires an analytical framework in which to interpret data in order to understand the context- and application-specific nature of these collaborations. We have studied peer-support communities (PSCs) in the context of the SAP Community Network (SCN), which relies on forums and conferences to support their collaboration. This research attempts to create a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of social support provided by peers in software development communities from the following perspectives: Responsiveness--how responsive are communities to the needs of its members? Engagement Intensity--how timely is the peer support? Role Distribution--how wide is the participation of users and in what kind of roles do they participate? Reward System--what is the impact of explicit reward (point) systems on community behavior? The data gained from analyzing these perspectives (and their comparison with open source software peer-support communities) has provided insights and led to an increased understanding of what works in PSCs. Here we articulate some initial design guidelines to further improve the potential benefits gained from these communities.