Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) is typically a team activity, requiring fluid coordination and communication between team members. Such working situations have often been described in terms of Distributed Cognition (DC), a framework for understanding team working. DC takes account of factors such as shared representations and artefacts to support reasoning about team working. Although the language of Distributed Cognition has been developed over several years, little attention has been paid to developing a methodology or reusable representation that supports reasoning about an interactive system from a Distributed Cognition perspective. In this paper, we present a case study in which we developed a method for constructing a DC account of team working in the domain of EMD, focusing on the use of the method for describing an existing EMD work system, identifying sources of weakness in that system, and reasoning about the likely consequences of re-designs of the system. The resulting DC descriptions have yielded new insights into the design of EMD work and of tools to support that work within a large EMD centre.

Coordination is a key activity in complex organizations with distributed actors. In this paper, we focus on conversations about coordination in a specific safety-critical domain: steering a large container ship in and out of a harbour. Based on a thorough ethnographic study of work activities in this domain we have identified communication problems and modelled how conversation about coordination is supported by formalized communication. From this conversation model, we have designed a mobile computer system that makes the conversation persistent by facilitating exchange of pre-defined text messages. We have validated the conversation model and the design of the computer system through development and qualitative evaluation of a functional prototype. The evaluation demonstrated that computer mediation to make conversations persistent is highly relevant to the work task considered. The evaluation also uncovered fundamental limitations in the conversation model, so we discuss how it can be extended. 1.

In this paper a view of the European developments in the field of wireless broadband multimedia communications is given following two lines: on one side evolution in Second and Third Generation of mobile communications; on the other side evolution of multimedia data communications. This two evolutions will merge into a new concept of communications: the Mobile Broadband Systems, or fourth generation of Mobile Multimedia Communications. Within this context, a multi-disciplinary project is

and presented by the junior researchers involved in the project. BETADE is funded by the strategic ARTD funds of Delft University of Technology. The central theme within BETADE is “how to design, evaluate, and maintain applications using advanced information and communication (ICT) infrastructures for distributed (organizational) processes”.

In this paper a view of the world-wide developments in the field of wireless broadband multimedia communications is given first. Taking this into account, a multi-disciplinary approach is presented as a combination of: promising applications, novel user-interfaces, compression, protocols geared to the mobile user and transmission techniques that give abundant bandwidth to the user. The insights of each of the research topics that contribute on the path towards