Prototyping Collaborative Geospatial Emergency Planning

Regional emergency planners use “tabletop” exercises to develop plans, to articulate strategies and constraints, and to practice working together. We conducted an experimental paper prototyping study to identify design requirements for a collaborative system to support distributed tabletop emergency planning exercises. We designed a reference task for geo-collaborative planning by adapting the hidden profile paradigm from social psychology as a model of obstacles to effective coordination in decision making. Our objective was to assess the usefulness and tractability of experimental paper prototyping methods for complex collaborative problem-solving contexts.