Eucalyptus: Intelligent Infrastructure Enabled Participatory Design Studio

A new notion of participation is at stake with advances in technologically mediated work environments. Insufficient bandwidth and insufficiently powerful, crudely coordinated tools resulted in distributed task-based modes of collaboration that did not allow full participation by members of distributed design teams. The emergence of service oriented architectures (SOA) and user-controlled light-paths (UCLP) herald the beginning of a new age where fully participatory multi-site design may become possible. While most service-oriented solutions are developed for gluing systems or data together, the participatory design studio (PDS) Eucalyptus is developed to manage and configure the resources needed by users engaging in a participatory design session, such as a videoconference application, and a visualization server. Harnessing the power of UCLP, Eucalyptus strives to provide a set of upper layer services for non-technical users to provision devices and applications running on high-speed broadband networks, in addition to conventional TCP/IP networks