This workshop investigates how Cultures of Participation, End-User Development, and Meta-Design are evolving in the era of AI-based systems.While Large Language Models and co-piloting approaches are transforming development into a more accessible and creative activity, they also introduce challenges related to agency, transparency, ethics, and sustainability.Aligned with the AVI 2026 theme "Interactive Creativity: Agencies, Interfaces, and Ethics", CoPDA2026 wants to explore how AI-augmented participation can support creativity, learning, and collaboration while addressing risks such as overreliance and opacity.The goal is to foster discussion and define research directions for responsible and empowering AI-enabled socio-technical systems.

Meta-design promotes ‘design for designers’ or, in other words, the creation of socio-technical environments that can evolve in the hands of the users. The long-term goal of meta-design is improving the quality of life in each person’s everyday activities, that is, living, working, and learning with the aid of technology. Today, advances in Artificial Intelligence provide new opportunities and frontiers for meta-design to empower users much more than in the past, giving them new perspectives, strategies, and tools to be exploited in the ‘design for design’ process.

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and meta-design challenge the understanding of the concept of “end user”. The 8th edition of a workshop in the series “Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age” (CoPDA 2024) aims to critically differentiate, dissect, and deepen the roles, experiences, and demands of end users considering contributions from different perspectives.

The sixth edition of the CoPDA workshop is dedicated to discussing the current challenges and opportunities of Cultures of Participation with respect to Artificial Intelligence (AI) by contrasting it with the objectives pursued by Human-Centered Design (HCD). The workshop aims to establish a forum to explore our basic assumption (and to provide at least partial evidence) that the most successful AI systems out there today are dependent on teams of humans, just as humans depend on these systems to gain access to information, provide insights and perform tasks beyond their own capabilities.

The society we live in today is frequently referred to as knowledge society or knowledge economy, and the futurist Toffler (1981) refers to it as ‘The Third Wave Society’ by arguing it is as distin...

The digital age of the future is ‘not out there to be discovered’, but it needs to be ‘designed’. The design challenge has to address questions about how we want to live, work, and learn (as individuals and as communities) and what we value and appreciate, e.g.: reflecting on quality of life and creating inclusive societies. An overriding design trade-off for the digital age is whether new developments will increase the digital divide or will create more inclusive societies. Sustaining inclusive societies means allowing people of all ages and all abilities to exploit information technologies for personally meaningful activities. Meta-design fosters the design of socio-technical environments that end-user developers can modify and evolve at use time to improve their quality of life and favour their inclusion in the society. This paper describes three case studies in the domain of assistive technologies in which end users themselves cannot act as end-user developers, but someone else (e.g.: a caregiver or a clinician) must accept this role requiring multi-tiered architectures. The design trade-offs and requirements for meta-design identified in the context of the case studies and other researchers’ projects are described to inform the development of future socio-technical environments focused on social inclusion.

This new edition of CoPDA workshop, the 5th since 2013, is dedicated to the discussion of design trade-offs that have to be addressed for embracing diversity and implementing an inclusive society. With this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners to discuss and exchange experiences able to inform design processes in a Cultures of Participation perspective, focusing on theoretical frameworks, practical experiences, case studies, and research projects, both in Academy and Industry.

Human-centered design should not only be grounded in understanding new media and technologies in terms of productivity, efficiency, reliability, and from economic perspectives, but it needs to explore innovative socio-technical environments contributing to human creativity, gratification, enjoyment, and quality of life. It represents a wicked problem with no "correct" solutions or "right" answers; the quality and success of design solutions are not only a question of fact, but a question of value and interests of the involved stakeholders.

Based on the assumption that the scarce resource for many people in the world today is not information but human attention, the challenge for future human-centered computer systems is not to deliver more information "to anyone, at anytime, and from anywhere," but to provide "the 'right' information, at the 'right' time, in the 'right' place, in the 'right' way, to the 'right' person."

Interactive spaces are ubiquitous computing environments for computer-supported collaboration that exploit and enhance the existing cognitive, physical and social skills of users or groups of users. The workshop aims at documenting and advancing the current state-of-the-art of co-located collaboration in interactive spaces and identifying research challenges and formulating a research agenda by inviting high-quality position and research papers from HCI, Information Visualization, CSCW and CSCL.

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. Keywords cultures of participation, social creativity, democratizing

This panel will discuss group processes that promote social creativity in science, engineering, arts, and humanities. We will offer positive and negative examples of social creativity projects, while suggesting research directions for dramatically increased social participation. The goal is to develop strategies that would expand resources and opportunities for research and education in social creativity. This requires our community to develop a unified position, then reach out to national science funding agencies, while building the case for the importance of this topic beyond our own community. How can social creativity, collaborative discovery, distributed innovation, and collective intelligence be framed as an international priority to cope with the problems of the 21st century and how can we identify a clear set of research challenges?

The rise in social computing (based on social production and mass collaboration) has facilitated a shift from consumer cultures grounded in an industrialized information economy (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to cultures of participation in a networked information economy (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful problems). These developments represent unique and fundamental opportunities and challenges for rethinking and reinventing learning and education. Our research in the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design (L3D) explores theoretical foundations such as meta-design and social creativity and designs, develops, and assesses socio-technical environments for this transformation.

A significant fraction of persons with cognitive disabilities are potentially able to live more independently with the use of powerful tools embedded in their social environment. The Memory Aiding Prompting System (MAPS) provides an environment in which caregivers can create scripts that can be used by people with cognitive disabilities ("clients") to support them in carrying out tasks that they would not be able to achieve by themselves. To account for the great diversity among clients, MAPS was developed as a meta-design environment, empowering the caregivers to develop personalized prompting systems for the specific needs of individual clients.

The history of the human race is one of increasing intellectual capability. Since the time of our early ancestors, our brains have gotten no bigger; nevertheless, there has been a steady accretion of new tools for intellectual work (including advanced visual interfaces) and an increasing distribution of complex activities among many minds. Despite this transcendence of human cognition beyond what is "inside" a person's head, most studies and frameworks on cognition have disregarded the social, physical, and artifactual surroundings in which cognition and human activity take place.Distributed intelligence provides an effective theoretical framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts and tools can be designed and evaluated to empower human beings and to change tasks.This paper presents and discusses the conceptual frameworks and systems that we have developed over the last decade to create effective socio-technical environments supporting distributed intelligence.

The objective of this tutorial is to provide the participants with opportunities to think differently about future challenges facing software engineering research and practice. Collaborative design, social creativity, and meta-design are identified as themes that will be of great importance in the years to come. The concept of design is used very broadly affecting all aspects of the process of creating, using, and evolving software-intensive systems. Stakeholders coming from different disciplines and engaging in collaborative design can contribute to social creativity by exploring new approaches, new problems, and new visions. Meta-design is a methodology empowering users to act not only as passive consumers but as active contributors and designers, thereby facilitating and supporting social creativity.The themes of the tutorial will be illustrated with specific theoretical frameworks and innovative systems. The relevance of these themes has been demonstrated by their desirability and importance on research, education, and design practices in companies, educational institutions, and research organizations.

Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools.

The power of the unaided, individual mind is highly overrated: The Renaissance scholar no longer exists. Although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, the role of interaction and collaboration with other individuals is critical to creativity. Creative activity grows out of the relationship between individuals and their work, and from the interactions between an individual and other human beings. Because complex problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses, it is necessary that all involved stakeholders participate, communicate, collaborate, and learn from each other. Distances (across spatial, temporal, and technological dimensions) and diversity (bringing stakeholders together from different cultures) are important sources for social creativity.This paper describes conceptual frameworks and socio-technical environments (derived from the systems that we have developed over the last decade) in which social creativity can come alive.

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.

Informed participation is an approach for community-based learning and design in which all participants actively contribute toward the framing and solving of complex and multidisciplinary problems. Informed participants go beyond the information given to explore large problem spaces, learn from their peers, and create new understandings. Informed participation requires social changes as well as new interactive systems that provide the opportunity and resources for social debate and discussion rather than merely delivering predigested information to participants. This paper describes courses-as-seeds as an application of informed participation to university-level courses. This application demonstrates key aspects of our approach and highlights direction for future research.

Technical, cognitive, and social factors inhibit the widespread success of systematic software reuse. Our research is primarily concerned with the cognitive and social challenges faced by software developers: how to motivate them to reuse and how to reduce the difficulty of locating components from a large reuse repository. Our research has explored a new interaction style between software developers and reuse repository systems enabled by information delivery mechanisms. Instead of passively waiting for software developers to explore the reuse repository with explicit queries, information delivery autonomously locates and presents components by using the developers' partially written programs as implicit queries.We have designed, implemented, and evaluated a system called CodeBroker, which illustrates different techniques to address the essential challenges in information delivery: to make the delivered information relevant to the task-at-hand and personalized to the background knowledge of an individual developer. Empirical evaluations of CodeBroker show that information delivery is effective in promoting reuse.

An inherent dilemma exists in the design of high-functionality applications (such as repositories of reusable software components). In order to be useful, high-functionality applications have to provide a large number of features, creating huge learning problems for users. We address this dilemma by developing intelligent interfaces that support learning on demand by enabling users to learn new features when they are needed during work. We support learning on demand with information delivery by identifying learning opportunities of which users might not be aware. The challenging issues in implementing information delivery are discussed and techniques to address them are illustrated with the CodeBroker system. CodeBroker supports Java programmers in learning reusable software components in the context of their normal development environments and practice by proactively delivering task-relevant and personalized information. Evaluations of the system have shown its effectiveness in supporting learning on demand.

The paper proposes a novel approach to locating software components from a large component repository: context-aware browsing. Without any explicit input from software developers, this approach automatically locates and presents a list of software components that could possibly be used in the current development situation. This automation of the component location process not only greatly reduces the search space of components so that software developers can easily browse and choose the desired components, but also enables software developers to use components whose existence they do not even anticipate. A software agent that supports context-aware browsing has been developed and evaluated.

Building truly "context-aware" environments presents a greater challenge than using data transmitted by ubiquitous computing devices: It requires shared understanding between humans and their computational environments. This essay articulates some specific problems that can be addressed by representing context. It explores the unique possibilities of design environments that model and represent domains, tasks, design guidelines, solutions, and their rationale, and the larger context of such environments embedded in the physical world. Context in design is not a fixed entity sensed by devices, but it is emerging and it is unbounded. Context-aware environments must address these challenges to be more supportive to all stakeholders who design and evolve complex design artifacts.

Although software reuse can improve both the quality and productivity of software development, it will not do so until software developers stop believing that it is not worth their effort to find a component matching their current problem. In addition, if the developers do not anticipate the existence of a given component, they will not even make an effort to find it in the first place.

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.

Article Free Access Share on Individual and/versus social creativity (panel session) Authors: Ernest Edmonds LUTCHI Research Centre, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK LUTCHI Research Centre, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UKView Profile , Linda Candy Loughborough University, UK Loughborough University, UKView Profile , Geoff Cox University of Plymouth, UK University of Plymouth, UKView Profile , Jacob Eisenstein Stanford University Stanford UniversityView Profile , Gerhard Fischer University of Colorado University of ColoradoView Profile , Bob Hughes Bristol, UK Bristol, UKView Profile , Tom Hewett Drexel University Drexel UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims C&C '99: Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Creativity & cognitionOctober 1999Pages 36–39https://doi.org/10.1145/317561.317570Published:01 October 1999Publication History 8citation646DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads646Last 12 Months24Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Complex design problems require more knowledge than any one single person can possess, and the knowledge relevant to a problem is often distributed and controversial. Rather than being a limiting factor, “symmetry of ignorance” can provide the foundation for social creativity. Bringing different points of view together and trying to create a shared understanding among all stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. Social creativity can be supported by new media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and solving these problems. These new media need to be designed from a meta-design perspective by creating environments in which stakeholders can act as designers and be more than consumers.

Users build personal information spaces (stored as bookmarks, hotlists, or as a personal page of links) as their WWW-subset and interface to access the World-Wide Web.As the WWW is a living ,,creature" that evolves and grows permanently, users have to take care that their personal information spaces can be kept manageable and up-to-date.Our prototype system BASAR (Building Agents Supporting Adaptive Retrieval) provides users with assistance when managing their personal information spa(;es.This assistance is user-specific and done by soft ware agents called web assistants and active views.Users delegate tasks to web assistants that perform actions on their views of the WWW, on the WWW itself, and on the history of all user actions.In this paper, we discuss aspects of the design-evaluationredesign cycle of BASAR by focusing on questionnaires, assessment studies, and system evaluations.

Object-oriented (OO) technology has been heralded as a solution to the problems of software engineering. The claims are that OO technology promotes understandability, extensibility, evolvabilty, reusability, and maintainability of systems and that OO systems are easy to understand and use. However, this technology has not been as successful as expected. An analysis of experiences and empirical studies reveals that the problem is not the technology per se but that the technology provides no support to software developers in performing the processes the technology requires. We present a cognitive model of software development that details the challenges software developers face in using OO technology. The model focuses on three aspects of software development—evolution, reuse and redesign, and domain orientation. We motivate this model with a variety of firsthand experiences and use it to assess current OO technology. Further, we present tools and evaluations that substantiate parts of this model. The model and tools indicate directions for future software development environment, looking beyond the technological possibilities of OO languages and beyond the context of individual developers and projects.

Programmable design environments (PDEs) are computational environments that integrate the conceptual frameworks and components of (a) design environments and (b) programmable applications.The integration of these two approaches provides elements (such as software "critics" and "query-able objects") that assist users in learning both the application and its domain; in addition, an interactive "application-enriched" end-user programming environment stresses the values of expressiveness and modifiability.By way of illustration, we present a newly-developed programmable design environment, SchemeChart, for the domain of charting and information displays.

Article Seeding, evolutionary growth and reseeding: supporting the incremental development of design environments Share on Authors: Gerhard Fischer Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, ColoradoView Profile , Ray McCall Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, ColoradoView Profile , Jonathan Ostwald Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, ColoradoView Profile , Brent Reeves Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, ColoradoView Profile , Frank Shipman Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, Campus Box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, ColoradoView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1994 Pages 292–298https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191770Online:24 April 1994Publication History 34citation1,183DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations34Total Downloads1,183Last 12 Months9Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

A discussion on recording requirements assumptions and rationale is summarized. Among the topics discussed by the participants are: incrementality in rational management; grounding argumentations in construction; architecture for integrated design environments; requirements definition in design; representation of rationale; rationale management systems; and incremental formalization of rationale.>

We are developing a conceptual framework and a demonstration system for collaboration among members of design teams when direct communication among these members is impossible or impractical. Our research focuses on the long-term, indirect communication needs of project teams rather than the short-term needs of face-to-face communication or electronic mail. We address these needs with integrated, domain-oriented design environments. Our conceptual framework and our system-building efforts address two major issues: (a) How does individual work blend into project work (especially in large projects that span great distances and time)? and (b) What role do the work objects play in this coordination? We use a specific domain-oriented design environment (NETWORK-HYDRA—for the design of computer networks) to illustrate our approach, and we discuss HYDRA as the underlying domain-independent, multifaceted architecture for design environments.

An approach that embeds human-computer cooperative problem-solving tools into knowledge-based design environments that work in conjunction with human software designers in specific application domains is described. This human-centered approach takes advantage of peoples' ability to understand and incrementally reformulate their problems, while allowing them to contribute to the gradual improvement of the underlying knowledge base. The notion of evolution circumvents the inability of the original builders of a design environment to anticipate all future needs and knowledge for complete coverage of a domain. The access and development of knowledge is supported in a cycle of location, comprehension, and modification. Modification includes the evolution of the knowledge base and tools. A framework for building such tools and mechanisms is described and illustrated in terms of three systems: CATALOGEXPLORER, EXPLAINER, and MODIFIER. User studies of these systems demonstrate the promise and the limitations of the design environment approach.>

Traditional information access systems generally assume that a well-articulated query exists, and that once an object is found, it can be readily understood. Although this assumption works for retrieving text objects, in more complex domains, such as retrieving software objects for reuse, queries must be incrementally constructed and support is needed for comprehending what is retrieved. Therefore, information access methods need support for query construction and relevance evaluation as an integral part of the location process. Two prototype systems are described for supporting this need: CODEFINDER for query construction and EXPLAINER for explanations of program examples. These systems interact to support the processes of locating and comprehending software objects for reuse.

Large information spaces present several problems including information overload. This research effort focuses on the domain of Usenet News, an open access computer-based bulletin board system that distributes messages and software. A conceptual framework is developed that shows the need for (a) flexible organization of information access interfaces and (b) personalized structure to deal with vocabulary mismatches. An operational innovative system building effort (INFOSCOPE) instantiates the framework. In INFOSCOPE, users can evolve the predefined system structure to suit their own semantic interpretations. The approach taken by INFOSCOPE differs from other approaches by requiring less up-front structuring by message senders.

Cooperativeproblem-solving systems help users design solutions themselves as opposed to having solutions designed for them, Critiquing-presenting a reasoned opinion about a user's product or action-is a major activity of a cooperative problem-solving system.Critics make the constructed artifact "talk back" to the user.Conditions under which critics are more appropriate than autonomous expert systems are discussed.Critics should be embedded in integrated design environments along with other components, such as an argumentative hypertext system, a specification component, and a catalog.Critics support learning as a by-product of problem solving.The major subprocesses of critiquing are goal acquisition, product analysis, critiquing strategies, adaptation capability, explanation and argumentation, and advisory capability.The generality of the critiquing approach is demonstrated by discussing critiquing systems developed in our group and elsewhere.Limitations of many current critics include their inability to learn about specific user goals and their intervention strategies.

Convivial systems encourage users to be actively engaged in generating creative extensions to the artifacts given to them. Convivial systems have the potential to break down the counterproductive barrier between programming and using programs.

We describe the critiquing approach to building knowledge-based interactive systems. Critiquing supports computer users in their problem solving and learning activities. The challenges for the next generation of knowledge-based systems provide a context for the development of this paradigm. We discuss critics from the perspective of overcoming the problems of high-functionality computer systems, of providing a new class of systems to support learning, of extending applications-oriented construction kits to design environments, and of providing an alternative to traditional autonomous expert systems. One of the critiquing systems we have built — JANUS, a critic for architectural design — is used as an example of the key aspects of the critiquing process. We also survey additional critiquing systems developed in our and other research groups.

No abstract available.

Design Environments are computer systems which support design by enabling cooperative problem solving between designer and computer. There are two complementary problem solving activities in design: constructive design and argumentative design. We have created two computer-supported environments, CRACK and VIEWPOINTS, to support these two activities. CRACK is a knowledge-based critic which has knowledge about how kitchen appliances can be assembled into functional kitchens. VIEWPOINTS is a hypertext system based on the IBIS design methodology and contains useful information about the principles of kitchen design. The integration of these two types of systems will eliminate shortcomings of the individual systems. Number of words In paper: 2987

People who attempt to use a complex information store on a computer encounter a number of problems: They do not know what information exists or how to find information, they get no support in articulating a question, and they are unable to phrase their question in terms that the system understands. Helgon, an intelligent environment that supports limited cooperative problem solving, helps people deal with complex information stores. Helgon supports retrieval and editing by reformulation with multiple specification techniques, and it acquaints the user with the system model of the information store. Within the current Helgon system, a number of different information stores have been implemented. Empirical evaluations have shown that Helgon supports effective communication. In addition, the evaluations have shown interesting extensions for future work.

Over forty years ago, Vannevar Bush articulated his vision of a “Memex” machine: “associative indexing, … whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” [Bush 45]. In the sixties, Engelbart [Engelbart, English 68] built collaborative systems to provide idea structuring and sharing. Nelson [Nelson 81] coined “hypertext” and proposed world-wide networks for publishing, linking, annotating and indexing multiple versions of documents. With increasing numbers of research projects, papers, panels and conferences, and commercially available systems (e.g. Notecards by Xerox, Guide by Owl and HyperCard by Apple) in recent years, hypertext may be an idea whose time has finally come — or at least a phenomenon not to be ignored.

Our goal is to build cooperative computer systems to augment human intelligence. In these systems, the communication between the user and the computer plays a crucial role. To provide the user with the appropriate level of control and a better understanding, we have to replace human-computer communication with human problem-domain communication, which allows users to concentrate on the problems of their domain and to ignore the fact that they are using a computer tool. Construction kits and design environments are tools that represent steps toward human problem-domain communication. A construction kit is a set of building blocks that models a problem domain. The building blocks define a design space (the set of all possible designs that can be created by combining these blocks). Design environments go beyond construction kits in that they bring to bear general knowledge about design (e.g., which meaningful artifacts can be constructed, how and which blocks can be combined with each other) that is useful for the designer. Prototypical examples of these systems (especially in the area of user interface design) are described in detail, and the feasibility of this approach is evaluated.

It has been argued for a long time that the representation of a problem is of crucial importance to understanding and solving it. Equally accepted is the fact that the human visual system is a powerful system to be used in information processing tasks. However, there, exist few systems which try to take advantage of these insights. We have constructed a variety of system components which automatically generate graphical representations of complex structures. We are pursuing the long-range goal of constructing a software oscilloscope which makes the invisible visible. Our tools are used in a variety of contexts: in programming environments, in intelligent tutoring systems, and in human-computer interaction in general by offering aesthetically pleasing interfaces.

It is our firm belief that solving problems in the domain of computational linguistics (CL) can provide a set of metaphors or powerful ideas which are of great importance to many fields.We have taught several experimental