Hal Eden

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.

Enhancing communication, facilitating shared understanding, and creating better artifacts by integrating physical and computational media for design

Frequently, the design of interactive systems focuses exclusively on the capabilities provided by the dynamic nature of computational media. Yet our have provided many examples ill which physical models provide certain strengths not found in computational models. Rather than viewing this as a dichotomy-where one must choose between one or the other-we are exploring the creation of computational environments that build on the strengths of combined physical and virtual approaches. Over the last decade, we have developed different design environments to support stakeholders engaged in design processes by enhancing communication, facilitating shared understanding, and creating better artifacts. Until a few years ago, our work explored physical and computational media separately. In this paper we present our efforts to develop integrated design environments linking physical and computational dimensions to attain the complementary synergies that these two worlds offer. Our purpose behind this integration is the development of systems that can enhance the movement from conceptual thinking to concrete representations using face-ta-face interaction to promote the negotiation of meaning, the direct interaction with artifacts, and the possibility that diverse stakeholders can participate fully in the process of design. To this end, we analyze the strengths, affordances, weaknesses, and limitations of the two media used separately and illustrate with our most recent work the value 00ded by integrating these environments.

Multilevel design and role play: experiences in assessing support for neighborhood participation in design

Designing and assessing systems to support neighborhood participation in design is difficult due to the challenges of involving real participants and the fragile nature of early instantiations of technologies aimed at supporting open-ended and ill-structured design tasks. We report on a scenario-based, semi-realistic field trial of two prototypes of the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory, an environment for supporting community involvement in design activities. By engaging subjects in playing participant roles, we have been able to gain some crucial insights into the facets of the design at multiple levels as part of an ongoing design process.

Getting in on the (inter)action: exploring affordances for collaborative learning in a context of informed participation

Although considerable attention in the CSCL community has been on distributed-, Web-, or distance-learning applications, there is evidence suggesting that much of learning, particularly in open-ended problem-solving activities based on tacit information, does not occur in isolation but in face-to-face settings. This has led our research to explore ways to develop technologies and media that enhance participation, collaboration, and learning in face-to-face, copresent settings. This paper explores the history of our research on developing such technologies in the context of our Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory at the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and discusses my research on interface design to support learning and participation in collaborative settings.

Making learning a part of life

e must reconceptualize our educational system. By emphasizing learning as a new form of labor and by acknowledging coverage is impossible and obsolescence is unavoidable, new educational strategies such as the integration of working and learning become necessities rather than options. Learning cannot stop with a high school diploma or an undergraduate degree. The world is constantly evolving, creating the challenge for individuals and organizations to deal with change and for schools and universities to prepare people for change. Learning should be a lifelong process allowing people to engage in authentic activities as those activities arise in their lives as thinkers, workers, collaborators, and players. Our approach to the design of educational tools is to strike a proper balance between constructionist and instructionist learning approaches. On the one hand, the constructionist approach permits learners to engage in self-directed learning, but without guidance, learners can feel overwhelmed by an infinite number of options and a paucity of clear goals. Instructionist systems, in contrast, are designed with specific goals in mind but offer little scope for creativity. At the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, our goal is to employ the notion of design as a vehicle to engage learners in personally interesting and meaningful activities. Design environments developed by the center help learners to create both computational and physical artifacts through activities in which complex problems must be framed and complex alternatives evaluated. Rather than being completely open-ended, however, our design environments are domain-oriented. In contrast to general-purpose programming environments, our systems are tailored towards specific application domains; this specificity permits our systems and materials to offer a higher degree of contextualized instructional support to students. Our focus on design leads naturally to a related focus on long-term activities. Our objective—as reflected in our systems—is not to convey specific information or narrowly defined skills as rapidly as possible. Instead, we are more interested in facilitating evocative learning situations. We believe our systems effectively complement the predominantly rational view of efficient learning. Learning situations should not be geared solely to train skills at high

Empowering users to become designers: using meta-design environments to enable and motivate sustainable energy decisions

Unsustainable energy consumption is a systemic problem facing societies. While technological innovations are necessary to address this problem, they are not sufficient; they need to be integrated with social and behavioral changes in order to be most effective. Our approach is based on understanding and using participatory design as a paradigm for software design as well as the foundation for socio-technical environments that enable and support a cultural shift from passive consumers of energy to active decisions makers. Our research is grounded in two theoretical frameworks, meta-design and cultures of participation. We are developing EMPIRE, a socio-technical environment supporting rich ecologies of participation that enable people to become active designers of their energy consumption. EMPIRE engages people to participate in the design of their own energy environment and supports individuals and communities in understanding and making more sustainable choices regarding energy.

From consumers to owners: using meta-design environments to motivate changes in energy consumption

Unsustainable energy consumption is a systemic problem facing society that requires technical and social innovations and changes. We argue for understanding and using end-user developments as not just another design principle but as a socio-technical intervention to help people make better decisions as they work to solve such systemic problems. We further explore two established EUD frameworks, Meta-Design and Cultures of Participation, to design systems for one such systemic problem: the energy domain. We present the draft for a system that incorporates principles from these frameworks to inform, motivate, and involve end-users in reducing their energy consumption.

The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC):Explorations in Human-Centered Informatics with Tabletop Computing Environments

Abstract The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is a long-term research platform exploring immersive socio-technical environments in which stakeholders can collaboratively frame and sol...

Increasing and sustaining participation to support and foster social creativity

The rise in social computing has facilitated a shift from consumer cultures to cultures of participation. These developments represent unique and fundamental opportunities and challenges for social creativity. The CreativeIT Wiki project represents an effort to explore and build a socio-technical environment for members of the emerging research community interested in creativity and information technology.