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Mobile or pervasive environments are inherently characterised by a high degree of dynamics and frequent changes in the environmental properties. This makes collaborative work of mobile users eminently difficult as the coordination of their work processes needs to adapt steadily to these changing circumstances. As location is one of the most critical changing context dimensions, this adaptive coordination and subsequent re-orientation are mostly based on distinctive temporal and spatial objects (the so-called Schelling points). The contribution of this article is to show the benefit of exploiting the human behaviour of using spatial objects for coordination (which we refer to as location-oriented coordination). We present an approach for which we implemented the location-oriented coordination considerations as a coordination pattern embedded in a coordination architecture, which serves as a runtime environment. By adopting this approach in a representative collaborative work scenario (in the domain of emergency management) and by presenting results from user tests we show its applicability and benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of interactive systems to be used in mobile and pervasive scenarios, such as emergency management, requires novel methodologies which combine user-centred design approaches and software engineering approaches tailored for distributed architectures. In this paper, the methodology adopted in a successful research project is presented together with a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]