A perspective on the design of human-centered collaboration systems

The combination of computer and communications technologies has opened up many new opportunities for getting commercial and social benefits for organizations and communities in general. Applications of computer science and computing systems today are not limited to businesses and office environments, but have spread into the military, healthcare and even entertainment domain. In this context, user-friendliness and human centeredness are two key terms fast gaining popularity and importance. In this paper, we attempt to provide a universal definition for human centeredness and a human-centric system. In doing so, we focus on five areas which we consider the most important while designing systems that are human-centric in nature. We discuss the need for human-centric system design, and in doing so analyze important issues and challenges in past and current human-centric design approaches. We also present a framework for human-centric system design, and discuss how this framework can be helpful to designers and researchers alike. We conclude the paper by presenting an architecture that incorporates human centeredness and collaboration.