There are many challanges in designing information technology use for first responders. One of the primary issues is to understand what type of information to mediate and how much information is possible to consume during the initial response work.
Perhaps the most fundamental question is to uncover in what ways the first responder can improve their work by the use of information technology. What qualities are in focus? Should the focus be on providing descriptive information about the accident and the accident location? Or should the focus be on connecting the various first responder so that they can share what ever digital material produced as part of the response work.
In an ongoing project we are trying to find a balance between all of this. We focus on the benefit of tehcnology, we aim to mediate some basic descriptive information and we are providing basic capabilities in order to make it possible to share information during the response effort.
We have specifically paid attention to temporal aspects of technology use and how the temporal aspects of the emergency response work affects the use and how this could inform the design of such technology.

Pictures from the evaluation work. (Jonas Landgren Copyright (c) 2006)
In field tests, we evaluate how, in this case, a fire crew make use of mobile information technology durng the transportation to an accident site and on the accident site.
//JML