No abstract

As each generation of children grows up in a world shaped by the affordances available to them in both physical and digital environments, their expectations of tools to support changing literacy practices make new demands on technologists and designers. To ensure that digital libraries (DLs) for young people support their understandings of libraries and reading (and not just adults' conceptions), an intergenerational design team (IDT) at the University of Baltimore (UB) used contextual inquiry and participatory design to develop concepts for augmenting the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) to make it more appropriate for 10-14 year olds. Our prototype aims to support "sociable literacy," a set of practices made possible by digital storage, retrieval and use of texts.

A web-based, a platform-independent software framework is developed to integrate distributed, heterogeneous software resources into an open product design/manufacturing system. We identify failings in previous systems, P2 and PRE-RMI, and propose systematic methods for the design of a software framework and implementation of a communication mechanism within that framework. An activity architecture of the product realization process is constructed based on the necessary interaction among engineers. This activity architecture is mapped onto a coordination architecture specifying the framework of the distributed software tools and resources. Thus the software framework is constructed based on the requirements of collaboration and communication between engineers. In addition, instead of exchanging information between engineers, the information flows are refined into message flows and data flows. Short commands and specific results are broadcast within product development groups in the form of messages, and large files are transferred directly as data flows. A prototype platform independent software framework, Web-based Distributed Product Realization Environment (WEB-DPR), is presented and its use in designing and manufacturing a high-speed robot arm is described.

The complexity of many modern products means that multiple design teams need to collaborate during product development projects. Driven by such issues, companies are increasingly staffing only their core competencies in-house and depending on other firms to provide the complementary design knowledge and design effort needed for a complete product. With the advent of the Internet, it is today possible that these external resources are physically, geographically, and temporally distributed. In this scenario, finding the right external resource for a given task and establishing effective communication between such resources are two of the most crucial elements of the product realization process. Through this paper, the authors aim to develop an information model and middleware that enable identification and use of suitable resources for design and design-for-manufacture stages in a distributed design and manufacturing environment. Such an information model and middleware will enable a designer to use XML to effectively communicate information regarding requirements, engineering parameters, process details and resource capabilities to different entities in the product realization process. The information model and middleware developed are implemented as part of Web-DPR – web-based distributed product realization environment developed at the Systems Realization Laboratory at Georgia Tech.