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The value of involving people as 'users' or 'participants' in the design process is increasingly becoming a point of debate. In this paper we describe a new framework, called 'informant design', which advocates efficiency of input from different people: maximizing the value of contributions tlom various informants and design team members at different stages of the design process. To illustrate how this can be achieved we describe a project that uses children and teachers as informants at difTerent stages to help us design an interactive learning environment for teaching ecology.

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A Co ncep t u al Framew ork f or Mix ed R ealit y En v ironment s: Designing Nov el Learning A ct iv it ies f or You ng Child ren A b st r a ctHow do we conceptualize and design mixed reality environments (MREs)? Here we describe a rst pass at a conceptual framework and use it to inform the design of different kinds of activities for children to experiment with. Our aim was to investigate how different MRE setups affected children's exploratory behavior and their understanding of them. The familiar activity of color mixing was used: different setups were provided, where paint or light colors could be mixed, by using either physical tools, digital tools, or a combination of these. The ndings of our study showed that novel mixes of physical and digital "transforms" engendered much exploration and re ection.