Prescriptions for Produce: An intervention with nutrition education, cooking instruction and produce vouchers to increase fruit and vegetable consumption.

In this pilot study, we evaluated the feasibility of nutrition education, cooking instruction and produce vouchers for pregnant low income mothers to increase fruit and vegetable consumption. Participants were first trimester pregnant mothers receiving prenatal care at a local Federally Qualified Health Clinic (FQHC) in San Antonio. They attended a grocery shopping tour and cooking class conducted by a registered dietitian, focusing incorporating fruit and vegetables into meals, and a monthly $40 voucher, redeemable for fruit and vegetables. Mothers with high menu planning and grocery shopping skills and more fruit at home reported higher fruit intakes. Mothers with high grocery shopping skills reported higher vegetable intakes. Compared to baseline, the reported home availability of fruit, and fruit and vegetable intakes were significantly improved at post 1; fruit and vegetable home availability, menu planning and grocery shopping skills, and fruit and vegetable intakes were significantly higher at post 2

Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study

Collaboration and co-ordination in mature eXtreme programming teams

Mature eXtreme programming (XP) teams are highly collaborative and selforganising. In previous studies, we have observed that these teams rely on two apparently simple mechanisms of co-ordination and collaboration: story cards and the Wall. Story cards capture and embody the user stories which form the basis of implementation, while the Wall is a physical space used to organise and display the cards being implemented during the current development cycle (called an iteration). In this paper we analyse the structure and use of story cards and the Wall in three mature XP teams, using a distributed cognition approach. The teams work in different commercial organisations developing different systems, yet we find significant similarities between their use of these two artefacts. Although simple, teams use the cards and the Wall in sophisticated ways to represent and communicate information that is vital to support their activities. We discuss the significance of the physical medium for the story cards and the Wall in an XP team and discuss the considerations that need to be taken into account for the design of technology to support the teams

Resilience markers for safer systems and organisations

If computer systems are to be designed to foster resilient performance it is important to be able to identify contributors to resilience. The emerging practice of Resilience Engineering has identified that people are still a primary source of resilience, and that the design of distributed systems should provide ways of helping people and organisations to cope with complexity. Although resilience has been identified as a desired property, researchers and practitioners do not have a clear understanding of what manifestations of resilience look like. This paper discusses some examples of strategies that people can adopt that improve the resilience of a system. Critically, analysis reveals that the generation of these strategies is only possible if the system facilitates them. As an example, this paper discusses practices, such as reflection, that are known to encourage resilient behavior in people. Reflection allows systems to better prepare for oncoming demands. We show that contributors to the practice of reflection manifest themselves at different levels of abstraction: from individual strategies to practices in, for example, control room environments. The analysis of interaction at these levels enables resilient properties of a system to be ‘seen’, so that systems can be designed to explicitly support them. We then present an analysis of resilience at an organisational level within the nuclear domain. This highlights some of the challenges facing the Resilience Engineering approach and the need for using a collective language to articulate knowledge of resilient practices across domains

Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition:virtuosity, discipline and the agency of insight in UK naturalists’ arts of seeing

Approaches to visual skilling from anthropology and STS have tended to highlight the forces of discipline and control in understanding how shared visual accounts of the world are created in the face of potential differences brought about by multi-sensorial perception. Drawing upon a range of observational and interview material from an immersion in naturalist training and biological recording activities between 2003 and 2009, I focus upon jizz, a distinct form of gestalt perception much coveted by naturalist communities in the UK. Jizz is described as a tacit and embodied way of seeing that instantaneously reveals the identity of a species, relying upon but simultaneously suspending the arduous and meticulous study of an organism’s diagnostic characteristics. I explore the potential and limitations of jizz to allow for both visual precision and an enchanted and varied form of encounter with nature. In so doing, I explore how the specific characteristics of wild, intangible and irreverent virtuoso performance work closely together with disciplining taxonomic standards. As such, discipline and irreverence work together, are mutually enabling, and allow for an accommodation rather than a segregation of potential difference brought about by perceptual variety

Whole family-based physical activity promotion intervention: the Families Reporting Every Step to Health pilot randomised controlled trial protocol

Introduction : Family-based physical activity (PA) interventions present a promising avenue to promote children’s activity, however, high-quality experimental research is lacking. This paper describes the protocol for the FRESH (Families Reporting Every Step to Health) pilot trial, a child-led family-based PA intervention delivered online.  Methods and analysis : FRESH is a three-armed, parallel-group, randomised controlled pilot trial using a 1:1:1 allocation ratio with follow-up assessments at 8- and 52-weeks post-baseline. Families will be eligible if a minimum of one child in school Years 3-6 (aged 7-11 years) and at least one adult responsible for that child are willing to participate. Family members can take part in the intervention irrespective of their participation in the accompanying evaluation and vice versa. Following baseline assessment, families will be randomly allocated to one of three arms: (1) FRESH, (2) pedometer-only, or (3) no-intervention control. All family members in the pedometer-only and FRESH arms receive pedometers and generic PA promotion information. FRESH families additionally receive access to the intervention website; allowing participants to select step challenges to ‘travel’ to target cities around the world, log steps, and track progress as they virtually globetrot. Control families will receive no treatment. All family members will be eligible to participate in the evaluation with two follow-ups (8 and 52 weeks). Physical (e.g., fitness, blood pressure), psychosocial (e.g., social support), and behavioural (e.g., objectively-measured family PA) measures will be collected each time point. At 8-week follow-up, a mixed-methods process evaluation will be conducted (questionnaires and family focus groups) assessing acceptability of the intervention and evaluation. FRESH families’ website engagement will also be explored.  Ethics and dissemination : This study received ethical approval from the Ethics Committee for the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Findings will be disseminated via peer-reviewed publications, conferences, and to participating families

The Role of Story Cards and the Wall in XP teams: a distributed cognition perspective

Much of the knowledge used within an XP team is tacit, i.e. it is hidden and intangible. Two tangible artefacts that carry information about the team’s work are the index cards which capture stories and tasks to be implemented and the wall where they are displayed (which we refer to as the ‘Wall’). It is widely acknowledged that these are key elements supporting the work of the XP team, but no systematic investigation of their role has been reported to date. In this paper, we focus on the use of these artefacts within one XP team. We use distributed cognition, a framework for analysing collaborative work, to explicate the information flows in, around and within the team that are supported by the index cards and the Wall. We then interrogate the models produced using this analysis to answer ‘what if’ questions

Understanding spatial data usability

In recent geographical information science literature, a number of researchers have made passing reference to an apparently new characteristic of spatial data known as 'usability'. While this attribute is well-known to professionals engaged in software engineering and computer interface design and testing, extension of the concept to embrace information would seem to be a new development. Furthermore, while notions such as the use and value of spatial information, and the diffusion of spatial information systems, have been the subject of research since the late-1980s, the current references to usability clearly represent something which extends well beyond that initial research. Accordingly, the purposes of this paper are: (1) to understand what is meant by spatial data usability; (2) to identify the elements that might comprise usability; and (3) to consider what the related research questions might be