Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are increasingly becoming part of organizations' digitalization efforts in many different domains. CPS are characterized by their heterogeneity and complexity, thus requiring the involvement of various experts throughout development. Digital Twins (DTs) were found to facilitate the acquisition of such technical knowledge required for effective designs. In particular, we pose that process-oriented model representations can help to account for various concerns (e.g.: privacy and security) across CPS components in a human-centered way, thereby enabling the active participation of relevant actors in requirements elicitation and design exploration. Our human-centered approach uses Digital Process Twins (DPTs) for eliciting and refining requirements for CPS design, and for supporting agile CPS development. Our ongoing project follows the design science method. We demonstrate results of the first design cycle and provide an example illustrating the modeling part of our methodology.

The emergence of customized services and products utilizing Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems requires specific design skills. Developers need to understand IoT systems as complex hardware/software systems of highly dynamic nature, coherently connected to design representations, such as digital twins. While the importance of designing a use or business case is acknowledged in IoT engineering, there is a lack of methods integrated with the early design phases of IoT systems. We propose an agile support method for design-integrated capacity building. The approach features tangible IoT components and their (meta-)models, which are complemented by digital learning support tools. The benefits stemming from tangible design and implementation are structured and aligned hands-on experiences including system prototyping.

In recent years the Maker Movement has gained increasing attention in digital and literacy education affecting a variety of scholarly settings. In order to attract and effectively engage academic students in learning processes within makerspaces, these processes should not only create desire for knowledge through innovative technological teasers but rather facilitate organizing individual learning experiences when working with digital production technologies in a self-determined way. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a learning support process for educators to organize and implement a course within a makerspace. In respect to existing learning theories and different educational approaches, the identified learning phases and support of makerspace activities to achieve learning results should help to specify and implement a didactic structure for effective learning experiences.

This special issue presents highlights from ECCE 2018, the 30th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, which is the annual event of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics (EACE). EC...

Today, modeling and subsequent digital model representations are essential constituents in collaborative endeavors on organizational change. Once created, models need to be digitized for shared stakeholder understanding and further processing. Whenever paper serves as carrier medium, it is likely to disrupt further processing, elicitation, and modeling. While digital environments support transformation processes in collaborative modeling from its very beginning, the necessary technical infrastructure still might hamper situated capturing of models. Hence, this contribution aims to reduce the need for sophisticated technical components by enabling stakeholders to capture their paper-based models in a situation-sensitive way. We present a system that enables capturing paper-based models with mundane technical means by end users under uncontrolled conditions. We describe the components developed for recognition of these models and embed it in a mixed-modality workflow supported by a tabletop interfacing a web platform for further processing. As our empirical evidence demonstrates, this approach enables both situated and error-tolerant capturing of hand-drawn conceptual models by individual users. Moreover, it can be integrated with more sophisticated IT-based modeling tools for further digital processing.

On one hand, today's communities, such as smart regions, undergo continuous development and change. E-services, in particular those relating to ICT-operated infrastructures, form the backbone of those communities. They need to be highly responsive, and react in a context-sensitive and informed way to events occurring in the environment. On the other hand, ICT-based services increasingly propagate in a concentrated way to a variety of infrastructures and become inherent parts of societal systems. Thereby, the complexity of the corresponding ICT architecture steadily increases. This trend conflicts with the flexible adaptation of ICT and the controllability of processes and underlying service architectures by humans. It requires rethinking the way ICT-based services are organized. In this contribution, we describe how event-based systems can become integral part of an actor-driven architecture based on subject-oriented representations. The approach is grounded on communication patterns between acting entities (artefacts or humans), allowing to implement service infrastructures in a federated while adaptable way. Due to the capability to execute models without further transformation, each representation can be validated before being put to operation, and software agents can be assigned in a flexible way. Due to the straightforward modeling scheme, stakeholders can be qualified to control and (re-)design complex service infrastructures.

The globalization of process industries has not only triggered technological integration processes, such as the Internet of Things, but also organizational alignment processes. While horizontal coupling of processes has been achieved through Business Process Management and Integrated Manufacturing Systems, vertical management and operation across organization layers still lack unifying approaches. In particular the vertical integration of business processes with production planning systems and production control systems is of crucial importance for agile business development. Moreover, process designs on the management and operational level increasingly need to be accomplished by the stakeholders themselves. Tackling these critical issues requires a human-centered and universal approach, as provided by subject-oriented modeling and execution. We demonstrate the horizontal and vertical integration of processes revealing fundamental capabilities and development potential of communication-based designs.

As work is an inherently cooperative phenomenon, it requires a common understanding of the nature of collaboration for all involved parties. In this way, explicit articulation work becomes an integral and essential part of collaboration. Implicit aspects of collaboration have impact on the quality of work results, mainly through social norms and observations of working together. Eliciting those aspects interactively helps in avoiding (mutual) misrepresentations and lack of understanding. Tangible articulation support systems allow aligning mental models of how work should be carried out. Stakeholders can develop a common understanding of collaboration in a semantically open and non-intrusive way. They are not burdened by explication features and diagrammatic notations. We have utilised experiences with model-centred learning theory to support explicit articulation work. According to our field studies, the resulting models can be fed back to current work practices and help in preventing problematic work situations.

Concept mapping is designed to externalize and represent knowledge. Together with their visual presentation concept maps should support focused and sustainable interaction between students and coaches or members of organizations. Hence, corresponding tool support has not only to empower persons externalizing their mental models but also to enable transparent multi-party interaction based on context-sensitive (re)presentations. We introduce the Tabletop Concept Mapping (TCM) technique and tool which is supposed to meet these requirements. Providing an open space to express individual thoughts and ideas, it maximizes openness with respect to pragmatics, semantics and syntax of modeling, and minimizes intervention through feature-inherent properties of the artifact.

For the automated evaluation of interactive software systems a variety of techniques exists. Different backgrounds, various concepts for representation and processing make it difficult for developers (and users) to identify the proper technique for automated evaluation with respect to acknowledged usability principles, such as the suitability for the task. In order to facilitate the selection and application of automated usability-evaluation techniques, we introduce a template for structured documentation and reflection. Enriching traditional schemes it addresses the relationship between usability principles and parameters used for processing. We consider the relation of usability principles to processing schemes to be of major importance, since it not only facilitates the communication between users and designers, but also reveals ways how qualitative attributes can be mapped on to operational structures. If we could utilize that information for design, e.g., for automatically checking specifications or prototypes, interactive-system development could be improved significantly. The proposed template stems from our work in the EU COST action 294 MAUSE (http://www.cost294.org) targeting towards quality assessment of usability-evaluation methods.

Intelligibility catchers (ICs) are novel e-learning components. Designed for self-managed learning and transfer of knowledge they encapsulate didactic and learner-centered concepts in an effective way. ICs are based on the context-aware coupling of individualized content elements to communication entries in e-learning environments. Due to their generic structure they can be used for any domain and on different levels of granularity. A first evaluation of IC utility reveals appreciation in terms of facilitated capacity building and focused peer-to-peer interaction in the course of learning and knowledge transfer.

An increasing number of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) software systems try to provide users with awareness information-information about the presence, activities, and availability of members of a community. However, most of these software systems are designed from a feature-oriented, rather than a human-oriented, point of view. In this article, a structured embedding of findings in social sciences is proposed. It reveals the variety of approaches in technology-driven CSCW developments featuring awareness, as well as the variety of empirical evidence in small-group research with respect to awareness. The authors have been looking at different aspects of awareness: the terminology used in both disciplines, the concepts that have been developed, and the different constructs that have evolved from empirical research. Finally, operational instances of awareness have been revisited. From these findings it can be concluded that awareness addresses different constellations of group settings, different types of individual behavior, and different contexts of use. These findings can be used by CSCW software system developers for postevaluation-that is, to identify empirical evidence for awareness features already implemented and to identify those already implemented features still lacking empirical evidence. The findings should also encourage social scientists to empirically investigate the usage of existing and envisioned software features in CSCW settings. Overall, the results should help to achieve a shift from technology-driven development toward human-centered design of collaborative communities, due to the envisioned integration of understandings and concepts.

Web-based knowledge-transfer environments aim towards self-directed and collaborative learning. They not only require enablers for personalizing content and context-sensitive interaction, but also for collaboration. In order to overcome deficiencies of current approaches with respect to contextual knowledge transfer, we consider concept building to link content to communication essential. Our technical enablers are tuned and enriched features for personalization and collaboration which we term interactive annotations. They have been implemented as overarching concept to hypermedia handling and peer-to-peer communication in the Web-based knowledge-transfer platform ScholionWB+ (Auinger and Stary, 2002, 2003). Our solution is highly flexible, coupling hypermedia content with common communication tools in traditional browsers settings.

Adaptability is a concept to improve access to content and navigation for individual users of information systems in various settings of interaction. Following the usability-engineering tradition to provide operational definitions of principles, and subsequently to develop techniques for evaluation based on these definitions, we revisited adaptability concepts and designed a structured technique (

There is consensus among the members of the HCI community as well as among software developers that work tasks and user characteristics (i.e. context) should play a leading role in the course of system development. There seems to be less consensus on how the information about users and work tasks should be acquired and subsequently moved to the design process of a development project. Due to the use of unifying methods and concepts--such as object-orientation-- that might be used for analysis, design and implementation, this transition seems to be facilitated. However, few inputs have been provided to guide developers on how to shift knowledge from analysis to design when task- and user knowledge are considered to be inherent parts of the development knowledge. This paper details the interface between analysis and design, reviews existing concepts to bridge the gap between the two phases of development, and enriches these findings with some empirical results from a survey with respect to practical experiences. From these findings, requirements to successfully shift knowledge in the early phases of software development have been derived.

Task-based and user-oriented user interfaces utilize knowledge about user tasks and user characteristics to the utmost extent. They support users throughout their work flows, and must be constructed by a development process that avoids loss of application context and involves user feedback, from requirements specification to code generation. The concepts behind the task analysis/design/end users systems (TADEUS) approach to enable seamless task-based development are a semantically rich representation scheme, a model-driven development procedure, a diagrammatic notation and unifying specification scheme. Thus, interactive applications can be developed seamlessly. Specifications comprise problem domain knowledge, work processes, user roles and personal profiles, as well as interaction modalities (required for task accomplishment). For user-interface prototyping the TADEUS environment contains a model interpreter that executes structure and behavior specifications. This way, early feedback on task-based portals can be provided by users. In this paper we detail the latest developments in the TADEUS project when implementing a work-process based usability life cycle. We review the underlying methodology and the features of the TADEUS environment, in order to demonstrate the benefits for developers and users resulting of smooth transition support for and between the different stages of development.

Task-complete activity-oriented user interfaces require the processing of knowledge that is based on front-line tasks and user characteristics. This type of knowledge enables the support of end users along the flow of work they are part of. Task completeness requires a development process that allows developers to trace the analysis, design, and implementation for particular user interface solutions, starting out with a transparent model of work in a consistent and understandable way. The Task Analysis/Design/End User Systems (TADEUS) project has led to a development technique and an environment that meets both objectives. The key concepts of TADEUS are (a) the unifying, but semantically rich notation for the representation of the results from task analysis and design; and (b) the executable specification of user interfaces. A workflow-based interpreter implements the latter concept, enabling early feedback on task-based artifacts by end users. This way, the stringent TADEUS methodology together with the tool support lead to a significant increase of quality in use and a reduction of overall development effort to achieve user acceptance through task-complete design and implementation.

This article reports on the results of the second meeting and workshop of the International Scientific Forum, "Towards an Information Society for All," that took place in Crete, Greece, June 15-16, 1998. In particular, it elaborates on the international research and development agenda (Stephanidis et al., 1998), which resulted from the first meeting and workshop of the Forum in San Francisco, California, on August 29, 1997, in the context of the HCI International '97 Conference. This article elaborates on the proposed research and development agenda by identifying human-computer interaction challenges and clusters of concrete recommendations for international collaborative research and technological development (RTD) activities. Four clusters of recommendations are proposed. The first three facilitate reaching technological targets, and the fourth comprises accompanying measures. The three technological clusters concern the corresponding transitions from (a) productivity tools to environments of use, (b) individual users to communities of users, and (c) computer-assisted business tasks to computer-mediated human activities. The fourth cluster covers support (horizontal) actions needed to establish a favorable environment for the creation of an information society acceptable to all citizens. Each cluster is elaborated by means of specific recommendations, plausible RTD objectives, and likely or expected outcomes.

The IDATG (Integrating Design and Automated Test Case Generation) specification technique and tool is introduced. It is designed for the automated generation of test cases during the testing of interactive industrial applications. In addition to checking the application's usability, IDATG supports both the specification of the behavior of a user interface and the generation of two types of test case i.e. for GUI coverage and for checking the usability of the application. The test procedure for both cases is based on a particular test process model and on a formal language for representing the user interface. The tool architecture comprises a set of visual editors, a language interpreter and a test case generator. The interface concept on which the components are based enables the tool to be integrated into industrial platforms for defining and executing test cases. A first cost/benefit analysis indicates a significant reduction of effort for test case specification and test result analysis.

High quality software components require a representation that allows the implementation-independent description of the structure and behavior of software components. Hence, the static as well as the dynamic structure of the system has to be represented in a structured way. Graph transformation systems support static and dynamic modeling through a single computational framework for the sake of correctness, maintainability, and integrity. The framework introduced along with the corresponding tool, UPGraDE (Universal Programmed Graph Grammar Development Environment), which is based on the universal graph language GRASP (GRAph grammar with Set Productions). Any type of system can be specified through a minimal set of operations (syntax) and rules to specify the behavior of any type of software (semantics). The UPGraDE Environment, consisting of several totally transparent interconnected modules, performing well defined tasks, is a highly modular and extensible environment suited for nearly every GRASP development purpose.

With the increased utilization of cognitive models for designing user interfaces several disciplines started to contribute to acquiring and representing knowledge about users, artifacts, and tasks. Although a wealth of studies already exists on modeling mental processes, and although the goals of cognitive engineering have become quite clear over the last decade, essential epistemological and methodological issues in the context of developing user interfaces have remained untouched. However, recent challenging tasks, namely designing information spaces for distributed user communities, have led to a revival of well known problems concerning the representation of knowledge and related issues, such as abstraction, navigation through information spaces, and visualization of abstract knowledge. All of these issues are associated with mental processes and thus, might become part of cognitive models. In this paper we reveal epistemological and methodological assumptions in the field of cognitive modeling as well as their implications for user interface design. It turns out that in order to achieve the goal of developing human-oriented (in contrast to technology-driven) human-computer interfaces developers have to develop knowledge of the structure and the representational dynamics of the cognitive systems which are interacting with the computer. We show that in a first step it is necessary to study and investigate the different levels and forms of representation that are involved in the interaction processes between computers and human cognitive systems. We propose a hybrid user modeling approach as part of the task-based development procedure in TADEUS (Task Analysis/Design/End User Systems). The hybrid approach does not only enable the representation of functional roles end users have to perform, but also how end users perform these roles, i.e. the representation and reflection, if not prediction of their behavior. This way, holistic system development that equally takes into account the organizational requirements and the end user reality at work places is facilitated.

In order to improve occupational health and safety conditions in the workplace, several national directives and international standards have been defined. In 1990 the European Union (EU) defined such a directive, i.e. a minimal set of ergonomic requirements that should be met at workplaces equipped with Visual Display Units (VDUs). In order to put the directive to work, existing measurements have been reviewed to evaluate how far they support the implementation of the directive. The instrument that should be used finally for checking VDU-workplaces should not hinder the work flow and the organizational development of a company. The instrument should rather support the effective evaluation of all VDU-workplaces according to the directive. The investigations in this paper focus on the analysis of 18 techniques for measurement stemming from different disciplines. The directive addresses several different perspectives including human cognition, organization of work and technical features. However, an absence of comprehensive measurements has been identified. Most of the existing techniques for measurement focus either on users, user interfaces or on organizational issues. In order to support the development of a comprehensive instrument to check the minimal requirements of the EUdirective EU-CON, a technique for evaluation and re-design of VDU-work has been developed.

Nowadays interactive systems cannot be developed in isolation from workflows and the application domains they are embedded in. Unfortunately, a conceptual gap exists between design representations for interactive systems and workflow specifications. This gap leads to a situation in which it can be checked in a very late stage of development whether an interactive system actually fits into a particular workflow or not. If not, redesign is required and the development costs may be increased dramatically. In order to avoid this worst case, the authors introduce a framework and environment that allows the refinement of workflows to system functions at an implementation-independent layer. In addition, TADEUS (Task Analysis/Design/End User Systems) supports workflow driven prototyping. Developing interactive systems this way not only removes the conceptual gap between workflow models and user interface design representations, but also provides early feedback for the developers through the interpretation of the design representations.

As soon as user interface design is seen as an integral part of business- and user-oriented software development, a framework and a methodology are required for development support. The hereby introduced TADEUS-approach provides both, and is currently being implemented, in order to provide developers with a corresponding environment. The approach is dedicated to the integration of the specification of interacting users (WHO) allowing individual perspectives, as well as the specification of a system's functionality in a declarative (WHAT) and procedural way (HOW). The design methodology is model-driven and object-oriented. It supports the specification and integration of business models, user models, interaction models, and data models. Any specification may be reused for prototyping and further application development.

The complexity of user interface design is still steadily increasing because of an increasing variety of innovative interaction styles (e.g., pen-based interaction) and because of an increasing orientation towards tasks as they are actually accomplished in work environments. In order to handle the resulting variety of knowledge that has to be taken into account for design, specification techniques have to rely on representation schemes for end user tasks and their organization, problem domain data, and interaction styles. Declarative knowledge representation techniques provide the capabilities to handle heterogeneous categories of knowledge as well as their integration. This article describes not only a conceptual but also a formal framework for task-oriented, declarative user interface specification. the conceptual framework is based on a semantic network. It is formalized comprehensively through LUIS (Logical User Interface Specification). LUIS is a novel many-sorted temporal specification logic. Using LUIS all static and dynamic relations between (1) end user tasks and problem domain data, (2) end user tasks and interaction styles (media and modalities), and (3) problem domain data and interaction styles, according to different levels of refinement can be captured. In particular, LUIS supports to stepwise refinement of knowledge to elementary data structures and basic functions. Moreover, in LUIS organizational constraints concerning the accomplishment of end user tasks can be represented by postulating axioms applying the modalities “First,” “Sometime in the future,” “Next,” and “More recently than.” Since each knowledge category corresponds to a particular sort of the specification logic, the designer can be provided with modular knowledge sources. They can be extended or modified for further developments in a flexible way. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The nature of task-oriented application design and the rationale in building interactive design support tools are discussed. A model-based approach for the representation of design knowledge is introduced. The approach comprises an end-user task model, a problem domain data model, and an interaction domain model. These models are mapped onto an object hierarchy, allowing the construction of a design knowledge base with reusable objects.>

To model organizational changes in cooperative but distributed problem solving environments, it is necessary to represent not only activities and knowledge concerning particular agents, but also the constraints for successful collaboration among agents, concerning mainly the availability of common knowledge and cooperative task accomplishment. The usability of such models mostly depends on their ability to describe communication events occurring in multiagent environments. To this end, the authors enhance a formal communication model with adaptation capabilities to capture organizational changes in cooperative problem solving environments. The model meets the appropriate level of abstraction not only for the specification of the communication among a dispersion set of agents, but also for concurrent common, but distributed knowledge, and related (a)synchronous events.>