1.1. interesting about the article?
I think that the design approach is both novel and well thought out. It is so important to
seek the opinions and advice of people who work in the industry for which one is building
a system for. It really is the difference between success and failure.

I recognized the 3D bus tracking application immediately. I took Dr. Alexander Repenning's
Object-Oriented Analysis and Design class in the fall of 2002. When he showed us that
demo I was truly amazed at the technology. I'm glad that it is being put to such a valuable
use.

1.2. not interesting about the article?
I would have been interested to know how a typical meeting of all of the collaborators
went, or how the collaboration process was structured. The paper addresses the
importance of participatory design, but not really the challenges of collaborating with
people from such different backgrounds.

One other point to make is how expensive PDA's can be and the issue of people getting
mugged. I think that if more and more people are walking around with these things, they
will become a target. Their movements are very predictable and routine which
makes it that much easier to prey on them.

2. what do you consider the main message of the article?
The main message of the article is that it is possible to design systems for a wide variety
of users who have disabilities of varying severity. Designers must collaborate with experts,
though, so they understand the vast amount of factors that could break the system.

3. are there themes discussed in the article which you would like to know more about?
I would like to know more about prototyping systems, developing 3D representations and
working efficiently with a wide variety of people.

4. what did you find interesting about the ?EDC/CLever? system?
The CLever system is taking advantage of state of the art technology such as 3D environment
modelling and GPS which I find very interesting. I find the idea of tracking things in real-time
extremely new and exciting.

5. do you know of other papers, ideas, and systems which are closely related to the article and the ??EDC/CLever? system?
I have done a small amount of research and agree with the article that most current systems
are programmable, but are not context and location-aware. They merely provide reminders
at certain times of the day, but if a routine changes, they must be reprogrammed to work for
the new routine.

6. what do the article and the associated system say about

6.1. design
The article is really about Design as a group process. No one person knows everything about
a) Public Transportation Systems, b) Cognitive Disabilities in all of its forms, c) Information
Technology and 3D representations and d) the daily struggles and behaviors of people dealing
with a Cognitive disability. All of these angles are essential to designing a fail-safe system as
well as the ability to stucture the design process so that the chaos of having so many people
involved does not hinder the progress of the project. I think the key to sorting out the chaos,
as the article alludes to, is a uniting factor, "a desire to design future systems that are inclusive
and universally accessible for all of society."

6.2. learning
As with any new apprach involving collaboration, learning is achieved through listening to
opinions, field research and working through tough challenges. I would imagine the greatest
deal of learning in this project occurred during prototype tests, when excitement was the
highest. This is, of course, where it is discovered what works and what does not.

6.3. collaboration
The article talks a lot about the importance of collaboration and who the players were in the
collaboration. Roles were employed to define exactly what part each player would take in the
design process. What was not discussed was how the collaboration was conducted, whether
it was through meetings of smaller teams, email, forums, etc.

6.4. innovative media to support for these activities?
Today we have programmable cell phones, PDA's, GPS, cell phone / PDA's and
above all, the internet, which make these systems possible. Once the semantic
web takes off, AI agents will be able to make these systems much more powerful
and dynamic. They will be able to access and use more complex types of
media such as video, charts, graphs and other complex images.

7. do you have any ideas how this research could / should be extended (based on your own knowledge and experience)?
As I have alluded to before, I think a positive extension would be to develop and outline a
framework for successful collaboration with people from various backgrounds. What are the
challenges? What makes a team produce results efficiently? What do you do when egos,
differences of opinion / perception, and personalities start breaking a team down?