The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology is part of the Fraunhofer network of over 80 research institutes world-wide. FIT has a 20+ years tradition of human-centred design of advanced information systems, pioneering work in areas such as computer-supported collaborative work. Today, FIT is making world-class scientific contributions in areas such as HCI (e.g. user modelling, context-awareness, multi-modality), CSCW and VR/AR. FIT has been a partner or coordinator in numerous national and European research projects for many years. Besides public research projects, FIT is providing services to industrial customers in these areas, with a particularly strong basis in usability. About 100 scientists from computer science, design, psychology, economy and sociology are rendering this work in an integrated multidisciplinary effort. FIT has laboratories for usability engineering, AR/VR, wearable computing as well as a design studio. Moreover, FIT has a group specializing on the modelling of national economies and forecasting the impact of new legislation and other government activities. One recurring success factor of FIT’s work is the approach of accompanying technological innovations with the consistent development of organizational structures and processes. For a number of years now, a thematic focus of FIT’s work is in the area of emergency response, ranging from support through mobile information technology (wearIT@work, STEP) to the modelling and support of command and control processes (...) to the exchange and development of best-practices for responding to large-scale disasters (SETRIC).

The Situated Computing Lab (SCL) at Fraunhofer FIT

The Situated Computing Lab is targeted at studying how information technology can support competent activities of people that are set in particularly challenging environments. This research focus came about through the study of using wearable computing to support emergency response and it is being pursued in the wearIT@work and STEP research projects. Part of this research is the empirical study of such competent activities (e.g. fire fighting operations) as a basis for design. Another part is the prototyping and evaluation of possible design options in collaboration with prospective users. In particular, research on experiencerich virtual prototyping for emergency response is being conducted in the SCL.