What is the EDC?

The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is a framework for supporting face-to-face design tasks. The philosophy behind the EDC is to bring together stakeholders and to provide computational tools to help participants frame and resolve their problems. An integrated physical/computational construction tool helps users frame problems through a physical construction process. For example, users may construct a neighborhood by placing physical objects that represent homes, shops, and roads. We have used various techniques to automatically recognize the manipulation of physical objects and to maintain a corresponding computational representation. This computational representation allows us to do novel visualization, simulate a dynamic system, or check a system against various constraints. In the picture, users are drawing a transportation system, and the computer projects a display of the updated neighborhood in the construction area.

In addition to the physical construction tool, players have access to dynamically generated information about a problem using an electronic whiteboard (not shown). This dynamic information tool helps link the current real-time decision making process with previous sessions and with relevant information. For example, alternate solutions to a problem may be recorded and compared. When users require information about an aspect of that problem, the information can be triggered on demand.

The EDC is meant to be used in domains where designing solutions is an appropriate way of understanding and solving problems. The EDC is meant to be an environment that immerses users in solving a problem by engaging in design and physical construction. Supporting this design activity is information that can be contextualized to the current task.

EDC Prototypes

Over the past several years, we have built numerous prototypes that demonstrate aspects of the EDC framework. Some of the domains we have explored include:

• Transportation Planning
• Urban land use / transportation planning
• Mass transportation
• Environment and Design
• Natural disasters
• Wildfires
• Flood planning
• Pollution
• Mine cleanup
• Education
• Water cycle
• Architecture
• Building and office design

For More Information

The EDC Home Page has a lot of information about the EDC including papers and an interactive demo.

Chapter 6 of my thesis discusses some of the challenges faced in redesigning the EDC based on lessons learned from open source projects.