Innovative socio-technical environments in support of distributed intelligence and lifelong learning

Individual, unaided human abilities are constrained. Media have helped us to transcend boundaries in thinking, working, learning and collaborating by supporting distributed intelligence. Wireless and mobile technologies provide new opportunities for creating novel socio-technical environments and thereby empowering humans, but not without potential pitfalls. We explore these opportunities and pitfalls from a lifelong-learning perspective and discuss how wireless and mobile technologies can influence and change conceptual frameworks such as the relationship between planning and situated action, context awareness, human attention, distances in collaborative design activities, and the trade-off between tools for living and tools for learning. The impact of wireless and mobile technologies is illustrated with our research projects, which focus on moving 'computing off the desktop' by 'going small, large, and everywhere'. Specific examples include human-centred public transportation systems, collaborative design, and information sharing with smart physical objects.