Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders

The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Design Thinking practice: Insights from the Ecosystem of Startups

Design Thinking (DT) is spreading out in the managerial community as an alternative way to innovate products and services respect to the classical stage-gate model mostly linked to technology-push innovative patterns. At the same time few disruptive technologies – like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning – are impacting the ways companies manage their knowledge and activate innovation and design processes. What is the impact that AI is exerting on DT practices? What are the main changes that DT is undergoing? These questions are analyzed in this paper, where the aim consists in increasing the understanding of the transformation that is occurring in DT and more general in innovation practices. Through a qualitative case study analysis made on startups offering AI based solutions supporting multiple or individual DT phases, the article pinpoints few main changes: i) a facilitation in blending the right mix of cultures and creative attitudes in innovation teams; ii) the empowerment of the research phase where statistical significance is gained and user analysis are less observer-biased; iii) the automatization of the prototyping and learning phases

From Data Literacy to Co-design Environmental Monitoring Innovations and Civic Action

Funding Information: Acknowledgments. We would like to thank all the volunteers, partners, and authors who wrote and provided helpful comments for this publication writing process. We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation for South Karelia Region and the PERCCOM programme. We also give our gratitude for South-East Finland – Russia CBC programme for supporting AWARE project, funded by the European Union, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Finland as the funding has made it possible for publishing this work and disseminate the knowledge. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).SENSEI is an environmental monitoring initiative run by Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT University) and the municipality of Lappeenranta in south-east Finland. The aim was to collaboratively innovate and co-design, develop and deploy civic technologies with local civics to monitor positive and negative issues. These are planned to improve local’s participation to social governance issues in hand. These issues can be e.g. waste related matters like illegal dumping of waste, small vandalism into city properties, alien plant species, but on the other hand nice places to visits too. This publication presents initiatives data literacy facet overview, which is aimed at creating equitable access to information from open data, which in turn is hoped for to increase participants motivation and entrepreneurship like attitude to work with the municipals and the system. This is done by curating environmental datasets to allow participatory sensemaking via exploration, games and reflection, allowing citizens to combine their collective knowledge about the town with the often-complex data. The ultimate aim of this data literacy process is to enhance collective civic actions for the good of the environment, to reduce the resource burden in the municipality level and help citizens to be part of sustainability and environmental monitoring innovation activities. For further research, we suggest follow up studies to consider on similar activities e.g. in specific age groups and to do comparisons on working with different stage holders to pin point most appropriate methods for any specific focus group towards collaborative innovation and co-design of civic technologies deployment.Peer reviewe

Design-led strategy : how to bring design thinking into the art of strategic management

Design thinking has emerged as an important way for designers to draw on rich customer insights to enhance their products and services. However, design thinking is now also beginning to influence how corporate managers bring customer data into their day-to-day strategic planning. We call this integration of design thinking into the practice of strategic management “Design-Led Strategy” and show how it complements but extends current design-thinking perspectives. Adopting a strategy-as-practice perspective, this article identifies four archetypal practices that managers can use to strategize with design-thinking content. Its findings provide insight into the practices associated with situating design thinking within organizational practice

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

The Playful Citizen

This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies

Microfoundations of dynamic capabilities in retail in the age of artificial intelligence and robotics

Abstract. The purpose of this study is to find out what are the skills possessed by people working in physical stores and how these can be utilized and managed in the future. The research problem lies in an assumption that do people working in retail stores obtain required skills and capabilities or not, and are they recognized and utilized by management. Many technological solutions have been introduced within the retail industry, but there seems to be lack of understanding how to utilize peoples’ skills differently as some predictable and repeatable tasks are (or will be) performed by machines. There have been studies conducted in the previous years about dynamic capabilities from the perspective of strategic leaders of companies. Dynamic capabilities have been researched in customer centric industries also from the perspective of corporate directors. However, there lacks a study that fully concentrates on retail industry (no other customer centric industries) and solely limits the research to study physical stores mainly from the perspective of people who actually work in the stores, not the leaders in headquarters. Therefore, it could be stated that this study fulfils a research gap lying in the analyses of dynamic capabilities and their microfoundations. The main results of the study show, that there are variations related to information flows as well as there are inefficiencies about information of technological developments happening in the field in general. There is high motivation towards personal and professional development and willingness to learn. Changes made in processes and operations are mostly based on stores’ own customer analyses and communication with their customers. Even though needs for changes are recognized and there is willingness to development, it is highly resources-dependent. Realignments or redeployments are not fully conducted within store operations if their current resources and technologies in use do not allow this. There is a need to move away from certain routines towards being more creative and analytical. Even though there were need to move away from certain routines, there were no indications of considering the routines to be disappearing from store operations. There are structures in stores and in their supportive operations, which enable good customer service, doing the tasks and routines but there are little enabling factors for other things e.g. to innovate and be creative. Skills such as ability to analyse customer behaviour, product knowledge, good communication skills, ability to learn and share new knowledge, plan, organize and prioritize are possessed. However, the structures and processes prevent to utilize these skills to truly fluently communicate new opportunities forward and be part of creating something completely new. Utilization of skills in a new untraditional way are remained in the background because of routines and the traditional role descriptions and therefore it could be argued, that the microfoundations of retail companies are not dynamic

Developing a Framework for Stigmergic Human Collaboration with Technology Tools: Cases in Emergency Response

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable ad hoc emergency response via digital workspaces have arguably made traditional top-down system deployments less relevant in certain situations, including emergency response (Merrill, 2009; Heylighen, 2007a, b). Heylighen (2014, 2007a, b) theorizes that human cognitive stigmergy explains some self-organizing characteristics of ad hoc systems. Elliott (2007) identifies cognitive stigmergy as a factor in mass collaborations supported by digital workspaces. Stigmergy, a term from biology, refers to the phenomenon of self-organizing systems with agents that coordinate via perceived changes in the environment rather than direct communication. In the present research, ad hoc emergency response is examined through the lens of human cognitive stigmergy. The basic assertion is that ICTs and stigmergy together make possible highly effective ad hoc collaborations in circumstances where more typical collaborative methods break down. The research is organized into three essays: an in-depth analysis of the development and deployment of the Ushahidi emergency response software platform, a comparison of the emergency response ICTs used for emergency response during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and a process model developed from the case studies and relevant academic literature is described