Evacuation Coordination Support System Lucy Gunawan 1 and Augustinus Oomes 1 1 Man-Machine Interaction, Delft University of Technology, EEMCS Building, Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD, Delft, The Netherlands {L.T.Gunawan, A.H.J.Oomes}@ewi.tudelft.nl Abstract. Disaster victims suffering minor injuries and yet still capable of walking are called the “walking wounded”. The problem we address is how to evacuate this type of victims more efficiently. It is therefore our goal to design a support system for the evacuation of walking wounded in emergency situations that supports collaboration among the parties involved. We are using a human-centered approach towards the design of our system. Additionally we are taking this approach one step further by explicitly designing for coordination. Keywords: Collaboration, coordination, disaster response, evacuation, design for coordination, walking wounded, support system 1 Introduction The “walking wounded” is a category of disaster victims that can largely help themselves in finding their way to safety. In order to evacuate them properly and efficiently, coordination is needed among all actors involved. One of the major lessons that can be learned from disasters in the past, and even from simulated responses, is that communication is often the first thing to fail [3],[5],[6]. Such failure is due to unsupported collaborative actions in emergency response rather than technology breakdown. It is therefore our goal to design a support system for the evacuation of walking wounded in emergency situations that supports collaboration among the parties involved. According to Klein et al [4], there are some basic requirements for a successful collaboration: agree to a collective goal, be predictable, be (re)directable, and maintain common ground. The process of coordination where common ground is checked and repaired by communication and actions are observed and (re)directed among parties involved is called a “coordination loop” [9]. A horizontal coordination loop happens when actors in the same echelon are coordinating their efforts. While a vertical coordination loop are any communications across the horizontal levels.