Reflecting on the usability of research on culture in designing interaction

The concept of culture has been attractive to producers of interactive\ud systems who are willing to design useful and relevant solutions to users\ud increasingly located in culturally diverse contexts. Despite a substantial body of\ud research on culture and technology, interaction designers have not always been\ud able to apply these research outputs to effectively define requirements for\ud culturally diverse users. This paper frames this issue as one of understanding of\ud the different paradigms underpinning the cultural models being applied to\ud interface development and research. Drawing on different social science theories,\ud the authors discuss top-down and bottom-up perspectives in the study of users‟\ud cultural differences and discuss the extent to which each provides usable design\ud knowledge. The case is made for combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives\ud into a sociotechnical approach that can produce knowledge useful and usable by\ud interaction designers. This is illustrated with a case study about the design of\ud interactive systems for farmers in rural Kenya

Design: One, but in different forms

This overview paper defends an augmented cognitively oriented generic-design hypothesis: there are both significant similarities between the design activities implemented in different situations and crucial differences between these and other cognitive activities; yet, characteristics of a design situation (related to the design process, the designers, and the artefact) introduce specificities in the corresponding cognitive activities and structures that are used, and in the resulting designs. We thus augment the classical generic-design hypothesis with that of different forms of designing. We review the data available in the cognitive design research literature and propose a series of candidates underlying such forms of design, outlining a number of directions requiring further elaboration

Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/

Towards an extended network-based description for BIM and Smart Cities

The pervasive deployment of “smart city” and “smart building” projects in cities world-wide is driving innovation on many fronts including; technology, telematics, engineering and entrepreneurship. Traditionally, descriptive models of built form were adapted to predict performance by using few data sets. This trend has recently diverted towards making short-term predictions and visualizing real-time information enabled by Big Data and the Internet of Things. Building and urban morphology need yet to adapt new frameworks to embrace these new technologies in the design and evolution of sustainable infrastructure. Through representing relationships between different infrastructure components and linking the resultant network to smart systems, it is perhaps possible to provide better predictions of the operational performance of buildings and cities. This workshop was dedicated to provide a platform for discussing these challenges between academics, construction and engineering experts, and policy makers. Together with a team of academics and researchers from UCL, the BIM Task Group at the Government Department of Business Innovation and Skills has scored success at releasing the Digital Built Britain construction strategy. The strategy will execute the UK government plans for BIM Level’3, making a shift from file-based collaboration to the more scalable and flexible semantic web. This is thought to provide opportunities for acquiring information about how performance data could support the design and operation phases of buildings and how BIM could constitute a bottom up approach to smart cities. The “Towards an extended network-based description for BIM and Smart Cities” workshop, which took place at Space Syntax Limited, was dedicated to tackle these challenges and plan for a start on the BIM level’3 project by attending to the morphological and performance aspects of the built environment and the wealth of research that was done in this field at UCL over the last decades. The workshop was intended to discuss a wide-range of theoretical frameworks and representational schemes for establishing network-based models as to structure data in building and urban information models and respond to social and environmental performance requirements of the built environment. The workshop has also discussed some applications and challenges presented by IoT, and by the data available on energy performance of buildings. The core discussion was centred on whether network-based models are fundamental to comprehend and represent the complexity of cities and inform urban design and public policy practices, during the design, construction, and operation phases of infrastructure projects

Illustration of immature HCI engineering: Carry forward in the development of military planning systems

In recent years, a number of difficulties in designing interactions between military personnel and their command and control (C2) systems have been identified. These difficulties are persistent and have been attributed to a lack of carry forward between procurement projects. In response to these difficulties, this thesis attempts to realise and then illustrate carry forward in a manner that is characteristic of a particular form of the discipline of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) - informal HCI Engineering. In essence, informal HCI Engineering is different from current best practice in that design work addresses general classes of design Problem and instances of general classes of design Problem, rather than just problem instances which are related to other instances in some, unspecified way. Consequently, in principle, informal Engineering offers additional opportunities to develop and apply knowledge to design work. Specifically, it offers additional opportunities to support; (i) the abstraction of general requirements from instance requirements; (ii) the production of general specifications in response to general requirements; and (iii) the instantiation of general specifications for particular instances. Further, the knowledge applied in support of design may concern classes of design Problem, rather than just instances or a poorly specified range of instances. In addition, informal Engineering provides an additional way of reasoning about the completeness and/or selectivity with which design Problem instances are addressed - reasoning with respect to a relevant class. In this thesis, carry forward in the desired manner is enabled by acquiring the minimum amount of knowledge necessary for carry forward of some kind - a preliminary conception of the domain of C2. Carry forward is then realised by using this preliminary conception to evaluate and specify selected aspects of military planning systems reconstructed in a laboratory for purposes of research. To highlight the distinctive characteristics of carry forward in informal HCI Engineering, and to monitor its potential effectiveness in practice, each attempt to realise carry forward is compared to the current best practice equivalent. Two attempts are made to realise carry forward in the desired manner, first, in late evaluation, and second, in specification. Of these, the second attempt is judged to be more satisfying than the first, since: (i) carry forward is fully carried through; (ii) both a general requirement and a general specification are developed; and (iii) in the case reported, the value of the specifications produced are judged likely to outweigh the costs of their development. Future work may seek to scale-up and transfer to actual design Problems, the manner of carry forward illustrated here