Transcending the Individual Human Mind: Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design

Based on our past work and a critical assessment of other approaches and systems, we are tackling the challenges now faced by what we see as the limiting factors for future collaborative human-computer systems. We are developing new approaches to support distributed cognition in which human processes such as thinking, working, learning and collaborating are redistributed in new ways among stakeholders, and their physical and computational artifacts when these are used as media for collaboration.
    Collaborative human-computer systems need to be rethought in the context of the wicked nature of most problems confronting society where human processes need to be supported. We have been developing the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) as an integrated physical and computational environment representing the convergence of simulation games, action spaces, and reflection spaces. The EDC is based on new conceptual frameworks such as creating shared understanding among various stakeholders, contextualizing information to the task at hand, evolution of system through use, and creating objects-to-think-with in collaborative design activities which take place around the table and beyond.
    For more information related to this talk, please see the paper "Transcending the Individual Human Mind-- Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design" located at:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/tochi2000.pdf