Faculty perspectives on interprofessional collaborations between occupational therapy and industrial design: A qualitative ethnographic inquiry

Incorporating a user-centred approach to universal design solutions improves functionality and access for a more diverse group of individuals to engage with end products within everyday environments successfully. Interprofessional collaborations between industrial design and occupational therapy are one approach that integrates a user-centred universal design perspective throughout the design process, as occupational therapists have unique expertise in understanding how individuals participate in activities and engage with everyday products and environments. This qualitative ethnographic inquiry explored faculty perspectives (n=5) involved in interprofessional academic collaborations between design and occupational therapy at the university level in the Northeastern United States. Five themes emerged: 1) “Benefits of Collaboration:” Improving the Design Process; 2) “Benefits of a Mutual Approach:”: Supporting Design Learning; 3) Interprofessional Awareness and Education Approaches “Help and Hinder” Collaboration Efforts; 4) Benefits and Challenges to Accessing: “Navigation of the Obstacle Course”; and 5) “Minding the Gap:” Professional Education and Training. Findings suggest that interprofessional collaborations between occupational therapy and industrial design via an embedded model positively impact design outcomes and influence student and faculty learning during the design process, clarify educational objectives, and prepare student industrial designers for future professional practice.Peer Reviewe

Volitional-supported learning with Open Educational Resources

User-centred web applications such as Wikis or Weblogs are becoming increasingly popular. In contrast to the early Internet, these applications especially focus on the participation of people, on the creation, sharing and modifying of content and on an easy access. Based on this, they are assumed to contribute to self-regulated and life-long learning which is on the agenda of most industrialized countries throughout Europe. However, as shown in the recently published road mapping work of the Open E-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project, comprehensive frameworks for learning processes that make use of Open Educational Resources (OER) are missing. In particular it remains unclear how OER can actually contribute to forms of self-regulated learning since this requires a great deal of volitional competence, i.e. the ability to deal with distractions and fluctuations of motivation or emotion which is therefore regarded as a crucial factor (Deimann & Keller, 2006). In this regard, the Volitional Design Model (Deimann, 2007) provides a useful instrument to unfold the potentials of OER by (1) targeting key aspects of the learner’s behaviour in the learning process, and (2) suggesting powerful strategies to tackle decreased motivation. An exemplified volitional design approach using OER will be discussed. (DIPF/Orig.

Integrating web services into data intensive web sites

Designing web sites is a complex task. Ad-hoc rapid prototyping easily leads to unsatisfactory results, e.g. poor maintainability and extensibility. However, existing web design frameworks focus exclusively on data presentation: the development of specific functionalities is still achieved through low-level programming. In this paper we address this issue by describing our work on the integration of (semantic) web services into a web design framework, OntoWeaver. The resulting architecture, OntoWeaver-S, supports rapid prototyping of service centred data-intensive web sites, which allow access to remote web services. In particular, OntoWeaver-S is integrated with a comprehensive web service platform, IRS-II, for the specification, discovery, and execution of web services. Moreover, it employs a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model and represent all aspects of service-centred data-intensive web sites, and thus is able to offer high level support for the design and development process

Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study

End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solution

The role of the service concept in model-driven applications development

This paper identifies two paradigms that have influenced the design of distributed applications: the middleware-centred and the protocol-centred paradigm, and proposes a combined use of these two paradigms. This combined use incorporates major benefits from both paradigms: the ability to reuse middleware infrastructures and the ability to treat distributed coordination aspects as a separate object of design through the use of the service concept. A careful consideration of the service concept, and its recursive application, allows us to define an appropriate and precise notion of platform-independence that suits the needs of model-driven middleware application development

Tool support for UML-based specification and verification of role-based access control properties

It has been argued that security perspectives, of which access control is one, should be taken into account as early as possible in the software development process. Towards that goal, we present in this paper a tool supporting our modelling approach to specify and verify access control in accordance to the NIST standard Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). RBAC is centred on mapping users to their roles in an organisation, to make access control permissions easier to set and maintain. Our modelling approach uses only standard UML mechanisms, like metamodels and OCL constraints, and improves on existing approaches in various ways: designers don’t have to learn new languages or adopt new tools or methodologies; user-role and role-permission assignments can be specified separately to be reused across models; access control is specified over class and activity diagrams, including ‘anti-scenarios’; access control is automatically verified. The tool is built on top of an existing modelling IDE and allows for automatic verification of models according to our RBAC modelling approach, while providing users with the ability to easily identify and correct errors in the model when they are detected

Interaction systems design and the protocol- and middleware-centred paradigms in distributed application development

This paper aims at demonstrating the benefits and importance of interaction systems design in the development of distributed applications. We position interaction systems design with respect to two paradigms that have influenced the design of distributed applications: the middleware-centred and the protocol-centred paradigm. We argue that interaction systems that support application-level interactions should be explicitly designed, using the externally observable behaviour of the interaction system as a starting point in interaction systems design. This practice has two main benefits: to promote a systematic design method, in which the correctness of the design of an interaction system can be assessed against its service specification; and, to shield the design of application parts that use the interaction system from choices in the design of the supporting interaction system