Zachary O. Toups

Implicit coordination in firefighting practice: design implications for teaching fire emergency responders

Fire emergency response requires rapidly processing and communicating information to coordinate teams that protect lives and property. Students studying to become fire emergency responders must learn to communicate, process, and integrate information during dangerous, stressful, and time-sensitive work. We are performing an ethnographic investigation that includes interviews with experienced fire emergency responders and observations of team burn training exercises with students. We distill salient components of firefighting practice, which are relevant to the design of fire emergency response education systems. We derive design implications for systems that teach fire emergency responders to deal with issues surrounding the communication and integration of fireground information: the mixing of communication modalities, the distribution of information acquisition sources to create information differential and uncertainty, and audible clues.

The Team Coordination Game: Zero-fidelity simulation abstracted from fire emergency response practice

Crisis response engenders a high-stress environment in which teams gather, transform, and mutually share information. Prior educational approaches have not successfully addressed these critical skills. The assumption has been that the highest fidelity simulations result in the best learning. Deploying high-fidelity simulations is expensive and dangerous; they do not address team coordination. Low-fidelity approaches are ineffective because they are not stressful. Zero-fidelity simulation develops and invokes the principle of abstraction, focusing on human-information and human-human transfers of meaning, to derive design from work practice. Our principal hypothesis is that crisis responders will experience zero-fidelity simulation as effective simulation of team coordination. We synthesize the sustained iterative design and evaluation of the Team Coordination Game. We develop and apply new experimental methods to show that participants learn to cooperate and communicate, applying what they learn in practice. Design implications address how to employ the abstraction principle to develop zero-fidelity simulations.

Zero-fidelity simulation of fire emergency response: improving team coordination learning

Fire emergency responders rely on team coordination to survive and succeed in high-stress environments, but traditional education does not directly teach these essential skills. Prior simulations seek the highest possible fidelity, employing resources to capture concrete characteristics of operating environments. We take a different tack, hypothesizing that a zero-fidelity approach, focusing on human-centered aspects of work practice, will improve team coordination learning. Such an approach promotes simulation focus by developing an alternative environment that stimulates participants to engage in distributed cognition. The costs of simulation development are reduced. To supplement preparation for burn training exercises, 28 fire emergency response students played the Teaching Team Coordination game (T2eC), a zero-fidelity simulation of the distributed cognition of fire emergency response work practice. To test our hypothesis, we develop quantitative evaluation methods for impact on team coordination learning through measures of communication efficiency and cooperative activity. Results show that participants improve cooperation, become more efficient communicators, differentiate team roles through communication, and leverage multiple communication modalities. Given the context of the study amidst the educational process, qualitative data from the students and their expert instructor supports the ecological validity of the contribution of the T2eC zero-fidelity simulation to fire emergency response education.

Emergent team coordination: from fire emergency response practice to a non-mimetic simulation game

We take the work practices of fire emergency responders as the basis for developing simulations to teach team coordination. We introduce non-mimetic simulation: economic operational environments that represent human-centered components of practice, such as team structures and information flows, without mimicking concrete aspects of an environment. Emergent team coordination phenomena validate the non-mimetic simulation of fire emergency response. We develop non-mimetic simulation principles through a game, focusing engagement on information distribution, roles, and the need for decisive real time action, while omitting concrete aspects. We describe the game design in detail, including rationale for design iterations. We take the non-mimetic simulation game design to participants for a series of play sessions, investigating how forms of information distribution affect game play. Participants coordinate as a team and, although they are not firefighters, begin to work together in ways that substantively reflect firefighting team coordination practice.

Game design principles for engaging cooperative play: core mechanics and interfaces for non-mimetic simulation of fire emergency response

Core mechanics are the activities that players repeat to play a game, the central aspects of play constrained by rules. Interfaces mediate play experiences, impacting engagement with core mechanics. We design core mechanics for gathering, integrating, and sharing information, based on team coordination practices of fire emergency responders. We connect these mechanics with interfaces that impact player engagement. Mechanics and interfaces combine into a non-mimetic simulation game, which eschews fire and smoke, in favor of re-creating information flows and team structures. We describe the iteration of mechanics and interface components as shaped by practice, pilot games, participatory redesign sessions, and long-term user studies. The result is integrated core mechanics that we develop from work practice and interface components that support engagement with them. From this data, we construct game design principles for engaging cooperative play: information distribution, modulating visibility, providing the right information in the right time, making predictable, and understandable representations for shared mental models.

Culturally based design: embodying trans-surface interaction in rummy

We present culturally based design (CBD), a new paradigm for designing embodied natural user interaction (NUI) with digital information by drawing on customary ways that people use physical objects. CBD coalesces experiences, practices, and embodied mental models of pre-digital activities as a basis for the design of interactive systems. We apply CBD to address trans-surface interaction, the manipulation of information artifacts from one device to another. We develop Trans-Surface Rummy, because the game involves highly dynamic combinations of turn taking and non-linear out of turn play, while transferring information artifacts to and from private and social surfaces. Through the CBD process, we create the trans-surface wormhole, an embodied interface technique. We investigate the trans-surface wormholes efficacy and other aspects of culturally based design with young students, and with elderly members of our local bridge club. We derive implications for the design of trans-surface interaction, and more broadly, from the process of CBD. We initiate a research agenda for trans-surface interaction.

A concise XML binding framework facilitates practical object-oriented document engineering

Semantic web researchers tend to assume that XML Schema and OWL-S are the correct means for representing the types, structure, and semantics of XML data used for documents and interchange between programs and services. These technologies separate information representation from implementation. The separation may seem like a benefit, because it is platform-agnostic. The problem is that the separation interferes with writing correct programs for practical document engineering, because it violates a primary principle of object-oriented programming: integration of data structures and algorithms. We develop an XML binding framework that connects Java object declarations with serialized XML representation. A basis of the framework is a metalanguage, embedded in Java object and field declarations, designed to be particularly concise, to facilitate the authoring and maintenance of programs that generate and manipulate XML documents. The framework serves as the foundation for a layered software architecture that includes meta-metadata descriptions for multimedia information extraction, modeling, and visualization; Lightweight Semantic Distributed Computing Services; interaction logging services; and a user studies framework.

Playing at Planning: Game Design Patterns from Disaster Response Practice

We draw on years of ethnographic investigation into the disaster response practices of fire emergency response, urban search and rescue, and incident command to inform the design of games. Our objective is to support training disaster responders, yet our findings apply to general game design. We identify critical components of disaster response practice, from which we develop game design patterns: emergent objectives, developing intelligence, and collaborative planning. We expect that, in implementing these patterns, designers can engage players in disaster-response-style planning activities. To support the design patterns, we survey exemplar games, through case studies. The paper contributes a set of game design patterns that support designers in building games that engage players in planning activities. \

A Framework Supporting Selecting Space to Make Place in Spatial Mixed Reality Play

Studies of mixed reality systems, especially games and play, have proliferated in the human-computer interaction literature, yet little research has directly addressed how designers select physical spaces to make places. A space is a physical area, while a place is a space infused with meaning. Mixed reality games that make use of physical space make and/or alter places. Selection of a space as a setting for a mixed reality play raises questions around immersion, safety, and user experience design. The present research analyzes the mixed reality literature through grounded theory to derive guidelines for selecting space and making place in mixed reality play. We consider 71 papers and 17 games after filtering over 240 papers for how they address space. We contribute a framing for mixed reality spaces on two axes: one that reflects space continuity and one that reflects space specificity requirements. From the framework, we provide design implications for space selection.

Validating Test Chambers to Study Cooperative Communication Mechanics in Portal 2

Cooperative communication mechanics, such as avatar gestures or in-game visual pointers, enable player collaboration directly through gameplay. There remain open questions about how players use cooperative communication mechanics, and whether they can effectively supplement or even supplant traditional voice and chat communication. This paper describes a future study to investigate player communication in Portal 2, and chronicles the design and validation of test chambers for the study.