Designing a mobile communicator: combining ethnography and object-oriented design

Communication and coordination of mobile and distributed work activities is a challenging application domain for mobile handheld devices. In this paper, we present the design of a mobile system to support communication and coordination between workers in safety-critical tasks in a power plant. The design of the system was based on ideas inherited from a communicator that was developed for a different application domain. The design was devised through a combination of ethnography and object-orientation. The mobile system we designed provides location-aware access to computerized information and process control on a handheld wireless computer terminal.