Digital information support for concept design

This paper outlines the issues in effective utilisation of digital resources in conceptual design. Access to appropriate information acts as stimuli and can lead to better substantiated concepts. This paper addresses the issues of presenting such information in a digital form for effective use, exploring digital libraries and groupware as relevant literature areas, and argues that improved integration of these two technologies is necessary to better support the concept generation task. The development of the LauLima learning environment and digital library is consequently outlined. Despite its attempts to integrate the designers' working space and digital resources, continuing issues in library utilisation and migration of information to design concepts are highlighted through a class study. In light of this, new models of interaction to increase information use are explored

Collaborative Interactions for Medical e-Diagnosis

International audienceThe Network and Distributed Systems Group within the University of Franche-Comte's computer research lab (LIFC) gained solid expertise on medical e-diagnosis in the area of remote collaboration through continued research and findings. TeNeCi (Cooperative Teleneurology) is a European remote diagnosis project applied to neurology developed under the aegis of INTERREGIII. INTERREGIII is a European Community Initiative program aiming at supporting cross-border, transnational and interregional co-operation in both social and economic perspectives. This paper has a dual objective: it first presents the improvements and contributions made to advance the TeNeCi project which is a research and development tool, and then it synthesizes our research work in collaborative medical e-diagnosis. The TeNeCi tool originality is to allow practitioners to act as if they were at the same diagnosis table, using a great panel of medical tools (images, software, . . . ). Collaboration and awareness features are used to make TeNeCi more efficient than classical telemedicine software in terms of collaboration level

Groupware design : principles, prototypes, and systems

Computers are valuable tools for a wide range of work tasks. A substantial limitation on their value, however, is the predominant focus on enhancing the work of individuals. This fails to account for the issues of collaboration that affect almost all work. Research into computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) aims to eliminate this deficiency, but the promise of computer systems for group work has not been met. This thesis presents four design principles that promote the development of successful groupware. The principles identify the particular problems encountered by groupware, and provide guidelines and strategies to avoid, overcome, or minimise their impact. Derived from several sources, the major influence on the principles development is an investigation into the relationship between factors affecting groupware failure. They are stimulated by observations of groupware use, and by design insights arising from the development of two groupware applications and their prototypes: Mona and TELEFREEK. Mona provides conversation-based email management. Several groupware applications allow similar functionality, but the design principles result in Mona using different mechanisms to achieve its user-support. TELEFREEK provides a platform for accessing computer-supported communication and collaboration facilities. It attends to the problems of initiating interaction, and supports an adaptable and extendible set of "social awareness" assistants. TELEFREEK offers a broader range of facilities than other groupware, and avoids the use of prohibitively high-bandwidth communication networks. TELEFREEK demonstrates that much can be achieved through current and widely accessible technology. Together, Mona and TELEFREEK forcefully demonstrate the use of the design principles, and substantiate the claim of their utility

A Framework for Identifying Sequences of Interactions That Cause Usability Problems in Collaborative Systems

Collaborative systems support shared spaces, where groups of users exchange interactions. In order to ensure the usability of these systems, an intuitive interactions´ organization and that each user has awareness information to know the activity of others are necessary. Usability laboratories allow evaluators to verify these requirements. However, laboratory usability evaluations can be problematic for reproducing mobile and ubiquitous contexts, as they restrict the place and time in which the user interacts with the system. This paper presents a framework for building software support that it collects human?machine interactions in mobile and ubiquitous contexts and outputs an assessment of the system´s usability. This framework is constructed through learning that is based on neural networks, identifying sequences of interactions related to usability problems when users carry out collaborative activities. The paper includes a case study that puts the framework into action during the development process of a smartphone application that supports collaborative sport betting.This research and the APC was funded by the University of Cantabria and the Government of Cantabria through the industrial doctorate grant DI27, given to Santos Bringas. Alicia Nieto-Reyes was supported by a Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades grant MTM2017-86061-C2-2-P

Towards a Personalized Assistance in Distributed Group Facilitation

With the advancement of group decision support systems (GDSS), facilitation has been regarded as one of the most important means in enhancing the outcome of group decisions. Many researchers have spent great efforts in creating useful methodologies and techniques to better support group facilitation. However, most of the research in the current literature deals more with facilitation targeted at a group-level than an individual level. With the increasingly available personalization techniques found in e-commerce, personalized facilitation seems to be a natural direction in group system facilitation research to deal with the needs of individual members for the overall gain of the group. In this paper, we address the needs for personalized facilitation in the context of the “EasyWinWin” framework in software requirements analysis by proposing a conceptual framework of personalized facilitation, developing a system architecture towards personalized facilitation and identifying key functions for a personalized facilitation system

Why do complementors participate? : an empirical analysis of the emergence of partnership networks in the enterprise application software industry

The enterprise application software industry is currently undergoing profound changes. The well-established, large providers (hubs) are fostering partner networks with small complementors (spokes). This paper takes the perspective of these spokes and seeks to understand their motivations for partnering. Drawing on research on dynamic capabilities and complementarity, an explanatory model of the spokes’ motivation to partner is developed. It is argued that partnering is especially attractive for smaller organizations when it enables them to access the hub’s complementary commercial, technological, and social capital. The model is empirically examined through a post hoc analysis of 17 small enterprises. The study reveals that the hub’s reputation as part of its social capital as well as its commercial capital indeed act as reasons to participate in partnership networks. In contrast, the hub’s technological capabilities may be seen as a double-edged sword. While the hub’s capability to provide integrated systems was found to be a prime reason for partnering, its innovative capability may actually detain spokes from partnering. The negative influence of the hub’s innovativeness, however, was found to be contingent upon the type of solutions offered by hub and spoke. The same holds true for the positive effect of the hub’s commercial capital