Four continents -- many lessons

Abstract

Welcome back to the ongoing saga of my world tour. We left offlast issue on the way to France. Indeed, on my way to Toulouse I experienced one of my favorite (non-computerized) examples of social navigation (remember Sweden from last time). Here I was, and English-speaking American landing in Toulouse airport. I'm first offthe airplane, and I follow the (conveniently bilingual) signs to arrivals. Then, I'm stuck. The path forks into "domestic" and "international" arrivals. I know what those terms mean. I know I flew in from the Netherlands. I even know that the Schengen treaty means I don't need to deal with passport control. But I have no idea whether "Schengen arrivals" is another branch through "international," or whether I'm supposed to pretend that I've just arrived domestically. On top of all this, there's nobody there to ask. Fortunately I think of a brilliant and face-saving solution. Deftly I bend clown to retie my shoelaces (did anyone notice that they were already tied?). Two of my flightmates pass me and walk through the domestic arrivals door, evidently without hesitation. Having learned my lesson well at SICS in Sweden, I quickly follow their footsteps and arrive in the right place. Social navigation to the rescue. And real-life proof that I learned something in my travels. In the past few months I've learned a great deal. In Tou-louse I visited Eurisco, a research center doing extensive cognition research with interesting applications in aviation. I also visited a research center focusing on air traffic control systems, seeing first-hand many of the innovations I'd only read about or heard about. Human factors are .critical here, as is the realization that the use-context may not really match the design specifications. For example, I found out that there's almost always an extra person at each air traffic control station-a trainee. That small change has a big impact on how screens and systems are designed. From Toulouse I headed to Grenoble, France, where I visited two major research centers. At INRIA Rhbne-Alpes I met with a group conducting research on electronic documents, particularly multimedia ones. Like the group I visited at CWI, this group had invested a great deal of effort into the standardization effort for internet multimedia, and was now searching for the next big research challenge. At Xerox Research Center Europe I saw a variety of interesting projects built around awareness and collaboration. Their …