Designing for women experiencing intimate partner violence

This thesis explores design issues that should be taken into account when developing mobile services for women experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV). The aim of the thesis was to apply user-centred design methods and gain understanding of the situation and the needs of potential users of a mobile application aimed at women under a threat of abuse. The thesis explores the opportunities mobile technology could offer to women recovering from IPV. The threats posed by the violent environment and the attempt to develop ways to reduce the risks were emphasised in the research and design project. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with the definition of intimate partner violence, the consequences of violence from a survivor point of view and the means of surviving violence. In addition, this section examines the risks and opportunities that information technology enables in abusive situations. The theoretical part is followed by a description of a design project aimed at developing a concept for a mobile application for women experiencing violence. The research on which the design work was based was carried out using user-centered design methods such as interviews, surveys and mapping the current operating environment and available services for survivors. The concept of the mobile application related to the thesis was evaluated using prototyping and usability tests. The thesis introduces the application concept that emerged from the design work and suggests principles to be used to support design in situations where users live under a threat of violence. The following principles emerged from the study: 1) safety and privacy, 2) validation and support for empowerment and 3) encouragement to reach out. The findings indicate that mobile applications developed with user-centred design approach can provide beneficial tools for coping with IPV. The potential features were for example anonymous contact to support organisation, diary, and information on violence and safety arrangements. The study implies that it is possible to reduce the threat of violence related to the use situations. The study implies that the risk of violence when using the application can be reduced by for example protecting the content with a password, hiding the actual content of the application and sharing information about security and privacy. It is also important to recommend that the users evaluate their own security situation and act on their own assessment.Tämä opinnäytetyö tutkii suunnittelutyöhön liittyviä kysymyksiä, jotka tulisi ottaa huomioon kehitettäessä mobiilipalveluita parisuhdeväkivaltaa kokeville naisille. Opinnäytetyön tavoite oli selvittää käyttäjälähtöisen suunnittelun keinoin potentiaalisten käyttäjien tilannetta ja tarpeita sekä kartoittaa mobiiliteknologian mahdollistamien työkalujen hyödyllisyyttä väkivallasta selviytymisen prosessissa. Väkivaltaisen ympäristön aiheuttamien uhkien tarkastelu ja pyrkimys kehittää keinoja riskien pienentämiseen painottuivat tutkimus- ja suunnitteluprojektissa. Opinnäytteen teoreettinen osa käsittelee parisuhdeväkivallan määritelmää, väkivallan seurauksia väkivaltaa kokevan näkökulmasta sekä väkivallasta selviytymisen keinoja. Lisäksi osio käy läpi kirjallisuutta tietoteknologian ja parisuhdeväkivallan riskeistä ja mahdollisuuksista. Teoreettista osuutta seuraa kuvaus suunnitteluprojektista, jonka tavoitteena oli kehittää konsepti mobiilisovellukselle, joka on suunnattu väkivaltaisessa parisuhteessa oleville naisille. Suunnittelutyön pohjana käytetty tutkimus toteutettiin käyttäjälähtöisen suunnittelun metodein. Menetelmät sisälsivät mm. haastatteluja, kyselyjä ja väkivaltatyön nykyisen toimintaympäristön ja palveluiden kartoittamista. Opinnäytetyöhön liittyvän mobiilisovelluksen konseptia arvioitiin prototyypin ja käytettävyystutkimuksen keinoin. Opinnäytetyön lopuksi tutustutaan suunnittelutyön tuloksena syntyneeseen sovelluskonseptiin ja esitellään suunnittelua tukevat periaatteet tilanteisiin, joissa potentiaaliset käyttäjät elävät väkivallan uhan alla. Suunnitteluperiaatteet on ryhmitelty seuraaviin kategorioihin: 1) turvallisuus ja yksityisyys, 2) kokemuksen validointi ja voimaantumisen tukeminen 3) hiljaisuuden rikkominen. Löydösten perusteella vaikuttaa siltä, että käyttäjälähtöisesti suunnitelluilla mobiilisovelluksilla voi tarjota välineitä väkivaltaisesta parisuhteesta selviytymiseen. Tärkeiksi toiminnoiksi koettiin mm. anonyymi yhteydenotto, päiväkirjatoiminto ja tieto väkivallasta ja turvallisuudesta. Tutkimuksen perusteella käyttötilanteisiin liittyvää väkivallan uhkaa on mahdollista vähentää erilaisin keinoin. Riskejä pienentää mm. sisällön suojaaminen salasanalla, sovelluksen varsinaisen sisällön kätkeminen sekä tietoturvainformaation jakaminen. Käyttäjiä on myös tärkeätä ohjata arvioimaan omaa turvallisuustilannettaan ja toimimaan oman arviointinsa perusteella

Co-Created Personas: Engaging and Empowering Users with Diverse Needs Within the Design Process

Personas are powerful tools for designing technology and envisioning its usage. They are widely used to imagine archetypal users around whom to orient design work. We have been exploring co-created personas as a technique to use in co-design with users who have diverse needs. Our vision was that this would broaden the demographic and liberate co-designers of their personal relationship with a health condition. This paper reports three studies where we investigated using co-created personas with people who had Parkinson’s disease, dementia or aphasia. Observational data of co-design sessions were collected and analysed. Findings revealed that the co-created personas encouraged users with diverse needs to engage with co-designing. Importantly, they also aforded additional benefts including empowering users within a more accessible design process. Refecting on the outcomes from the diferent user groups, we conclude with a discussion of the potential for co-created personas to be applied more broadly

THE ENTANGLEMENT OF INFLUENTIAL TECHNOLOGY CHANNELS IN PRACTICE AND DESIGN

Design for academic practice is an important phenomenon in Higher Education. This is the practice through which informal, non-professional designers operating in a variety of roles in academic institutions carry out the design of systems, resources, activities and processes that are intended to enhance academic practice. Despite its importance, the area has not received sufficient attention in studies of academic practice, quality enhancement and digital transformation. This thesis argues that the absence of insight into how designers for academic practice engage with digital technology in their design practice contributes to the mismatch between the ambitions for digital transformation in higher education and the reality of how digital technology is used in higher education. This research has developed an approach to address this issue and enhance how designers for academic practice engage with the digital technologies that are enacted in the practices of lecturers in an academic institution. This approach adopts a novel theoretical lens developed for this research, termed Influential Technology Channels, that produces a model of technology use in everyday practice and provides access, through the existing use of technology, to the enactment of academic practice. This model is used alongside another contribution from this research, practice-based personas – a modelling method that represents the diverse collections of technology use that constitute academic practice, and thus enables designers for academic practice to navigate and engage with the diversity of practice in the population of lecturers in the academic institution. Using this approach to design for academic practice, the form of design characterised and investigated in this research, informal designers are supported to achieve a greater understanding of the audience for which they are designing and explore designs that build upon existing, diverse, situated practice in ways that would not otherwise be possible. Through the implementation of an instrumental case study, this research demonstrates how these methods provide the meaningful connections between design and practice that can support digital enhancement and digital transformation initiatives on a broad scale, enabling designers to better engage with diverse people, practices and uses of digital technology as they seek to enhance academic practice

Design as a catalyst for innovation in science

Science, as a broad field of study, is faced with the imperative to innovate, not just invent. However, innovation is often considered intangible or unattainable – a lofty, unrealistic goal. Design has been demonstrated as a valuable approach to innovation, and thus this research seeks to understand the role of design as a catalyst for innovation in science. This study involves a longitudinal case study, where the PhD candidate was positioned within a scientific team over nine months, assuming the role of both embedded designer and case study researcher. This thesis synthesises the findings around the changing perceptions towards design, as well as the opportunities and challenges experienced along the way, to deliver key recommendations for design and science. These recommendations fall under five themes: embracing design as a mindset, drawing parallels and contrasts between design and science, recognising systemic challenges and barriers, adopting a team-centred approach, and empowerment through experiential learning These recommendations are intended to support three audiences – design practitioners working with scientists, scientists interested in adopting design, and researchers working at the intersection of design and science

Developing a persona-based user-centred design model in relation to idea generation that will both manage the product design processes and solve design problems

User-Centred Design (UCD) was proposed in the 1980s and, since then, its philosophy has helped to solve design problems, regardless of the advances in technology over time. The standard ISO 9241:210 (2010), formerly ISO 13407, provides guidance in human-centred design principles and activities undertaken throughout the design lifecycle to further support UCD. In addition, since it was mentioned in ISO 9241:210, UCD has also utilised User Experience Design (UXD) in recent years. There are many approaches that support UCD to ensure it is more attainable when designing. In addition, large firms, such as HP, IBM and Microsoft, use anthropologists in their user research in order to make products more user-centred. However, the concept of UCD should, theoretically, be more widely used in all product design and it is intriguing as to why it is not as popular as it should be. As noticed in the real world, imperfect designs still frustrate us everywhere. The aims of this thesis were to investigate the difficulties of practicing a UCD approach in idea generation and to design solutions for idea generation that would encourage further practice of UCD/UXD. In the first part of the thesis, there is an exploration of the problems encountered when practicing UCD idea generation. When examining the process, a multitude of problems were found, with most blamed as being costly, time consuming and requiring complex skills. In addition, it was suggested that a systematic solution was required to overcome such difficulties. Therefore, later in this research, a systematic model is proposed and evaluated using participants (both designers and target users). Due to the fact that design practitioners are not usually researchers, further help to implement the model in the form of persona application software is needed. Hence, the concept of service design was employed to further assist with the use of the model. In the end, computer-aided development was introduced, together with the integration of the systematic UCD model. The UCD model and the software have been evaluated as effective from both the responses of product design practitioners and end-users. Future recommendations and the research limitations are also discussed in each chapter and the overall results are given in the last chapter. This thesis successfully provided the complete process during the exploration of the low usage problems of UCD, and solutions were presented to assist designers with their UCD/UXD in the future

Energizing middle managers' practice in organizational learning

Purpose This paper aims to consider middle managers' influence on organizational learning by exploring how they cope with demands and tensions in their role and whether their practice affects available team energy. Design/methodology/approach In total, 43 managers from three large organizations involved in major change assessed their group's energy using a tested and validated instrument, the OEQ12©. This generated six distinct categories of team energy, from highly productive to corrosive. Thirty-four of these managers, spread across the six categories, completed a Twenty Statements Test and a follow-up interview to explore their cognitive, affective and behavioural responses to coping with resource constraints and tensions in their role. Findings The research provides preliminary insights into what distinguishes a middle manager persona co-ordinating teams with highly productive energy from those managing groups with less available energy to engage with knowledge and learning. It considers why these distinctions may affect collective sensitivities in the organizational learning process. Research limitations/implications Informants were not equally distributed across the six team energy categories; therefore, some middle manager personas are more indicative than others. Practical implications This research suggests areas where middle manager development could potentially improve organizational learning. Originality/value This study offers early empirical evidence that middle managers' orientation to their role is entangled with the process of energizing their teams in organizational learning during change

Capturing multi-stakeholder needs in Customer-Centric Cloud Service Design

Cloud computing applications and services go hand in hand, yet there is no clear mechanism for ensuring that the cloud applications are designed from a customer’s perspective. Likewise services can require adaptation for multiple customers of stakeholders, which require differing user experience outcomes. This paper describes the initial design and development of a predictive analytics cloud service application, which uses historic customer data to predict the existing customers that are most likely to churn. Service blueprinting, a service innovation method, was used as the underlying design model for developing an initial shared understanding of the required service. Personas were used in the requirements analysis to develop insights into multi-stakeholder needs. Using the design science paradigm an extended cloud service design theory is proposed, as an outcome of the ongoing development of this analytics platform

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

Beyond Rare Disease Patients: Exploring Machine Learning Interventions To Support People Experiencing a Diagnostic Odyssey

People with a rare condition face several hurdles throughout their odyssey to obtain a diagnosis. This odyssey lasts several years and involves frequent referrals and misdiagnoses, often resulting in permanent and severe consequences on patients’ health. In addition, patients feel unheard by their healthcare providers and isolated from their peers who ‘just don’t understand’. The UK Strategy for Rare Diseases states that patients can play a significant role in their diagnosis if given suitable resources. However, patients with rare diseases feel that they lack the support they need. This thesis explores the role that technology can have in addressing this gap in support.Within this context, this thesis spans a range of topics, from human-centred design approaches to generating data and presenting a new methodological approach. Through a human-centred approach, we characterise the needs of rare disease patients, thus opening the research space to include previously unmet support needs. In addition, we identify limitations with existing measures of success and highlight the importance of a reduction in the time of diagnosis for rare disease pre-diagnostic technology. This provides the basis the simulation-based methodological approach that we develop. The simulation-task aimed to mirror the information seeking tasks that rare disease patients undertake. To do this, we curate data that is representative of a rare disease patient’s perspective, both in terms of the terminology used and the stage in which symptoms and clinical findings are discovered. In addition, we curate a pre-diagnostic patient matching prototype that is designed around rare disease patients’ needs and demonstrate that (in comparison to two search engines) our application shows greater potential to: aid clinical experiences; facilitate empathetic support networks; and provide better facilitation of information-seeking. All of these contributions stem from a critical examination of the experiences that rare disease patients go through on their journeys towards diagnosis and aim to pave the way for future research within this area