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Genevieve Hudak DLC – hw1 – Jan 21, 2004 Fischer, G. and James Sullivan: "Human-Centered Public Transportation Systems for Persons with Cognitive Disabilities - Challenges and Insights for Participatory Design", Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference (PDC'02), Malm� University, Sweden, June 2002, CPSR, P.O. Box 717, Palo Alto, CA 94302, pp 194-198. 1. what did you find 1.1. interesting about the article? I found their approach to design interesting. Instead of just going at it thinking they knew the slightest bit, then instead decided that they did not. And in researching the problem, they came across a difficult aspect – ‘universe of one’. Now they were faced with the challenge of designing a system that would have a different end result for every user. Not daunted they proceeded by gathering a large group of resources, i.e. researchers, educators, mentors, etc, to attack the problem from every angle. They also included the target users, which may seem obvious, but is in fact brilliant. Rather than assuming a ‘user class’, instead they recognized that the only way to get a true idea of the diversity of the users, they would have to work with them directly. I also found the surveys of users to be the most interesting. The fact that this is not only a problem for cognitively disabled users, but that even the most familiar users can get into the same kinds of situations – begs that maybe the system in general needs improvement, not just the system for cognitively disabled users. 1.2. not interesting about the article? I thought the whole article was interesting. 2. what do you consider the main message of the article? I would consider the main message of the article to be that participatory design is a useful method for meeting larger challenges and discovering deeper insights than merely designing a system under the impression of ‘experts’. The article also suggests that the problem one is trying to solve when designing a system may not be the one you end up solving or the one that it turns out you need to solve. 3. are there themes discussed in the article which you would like to know more about? I would like to know more about personalization and universal design. In particular, I am interested in the idea of ‘universe of one’ because I believe that in general it is hard to design systems for a general ‘user class’. I am also interested in navigation and error correction. Having been an unfortunate beginning user at the bus system, I have gotten on the wrong bus too many times just to go way out of my way, in some cases to a place where there was no bus to bring me back. 4. what did you find interesting about the �EDC/CLever� system? What I found interesting about the Clever system is how many groups are involved in the research and design. I think that this approach to design can only be beneficial. Although some might argue ‘too many cooks in the kitchen,’ I think that the more heads, the more ideas, and the more ideas, and different points of view, the more inclusive the project will be. 5. do you know of other papers, ideas, and systems which are closely related to the article and the ��EDC/CLever� system? Nope. 6. what do the article and the associated system say about 6.1. design 6.2. learning 6.3. collaboration 6.4. innovative media to support for these activities? 7. do you have any ideas how this research could / should be extended (based on your own knowledge and experience)? I’m not sure if this is an extension in any way, but I think that if a system were to try and prevent all types of errors, that it probably could not. But if it at least took care of all of the major and/or most severe errors, then it would have accomplished ~80-90% of all error trapping. So I would say, attack things like sleeping on the bus by having an alarm go off, make sure they get on the right bus using GPS, etc, etc. As far as usability of a system like this, I would say, don’t make it to annoying to the outside world – don’t have this loud PDA that annoys all of the other passengers when it is Joann’s time to get off the bus. I would recommend an ear-piece or something. |
