Understanding the Influencing Factors and Mechanism of Social Compensation for Chinese Older Adults Using Social Media in the Context of Smart Home: A Qualitative Analysis

As a new generation of necessary terminals for future homes, smart homes have become one of the essential mediums for smart aging at home. This paper aims to explore how older adults who age at home can overcome the digital divide of the new medium and achieve social participation in the home context to realize active aging. Based on the theory of social compensation, we select the smart-home smart screen, a representative new medium product in China, and carry out open coding, spindle coding, selective coding, and theoretical construction of the original interview data through the grounded theory research method. The results show that the main factors affecting the social compensation of older adults to smart home social media include user interface quality, interaction quality, content quality, and service quality, and these four factors are used as external variables to compensate older adults socially, thereby stimulating the emotional experience and perception changes at the cognitive level of older adults and then affecting the adoption and acceptance of smart home social media by older adults. This study refines the factors influencing the older adults' use of smart home social media from the perspective of social compensation. It explains the mechanism of acceptable behavior of older adults, bridging the gap in previous literature on the influencing factors and behavioral mechanisms of older adults of smart home social media. This paper provides a theoretical basis and guidance for the subsequent academic research and software development practice of social media under new technological devices to further help older adults in China achieve active and healthy aging

A comparative analysis of Decide Madrid and vTaiwan, two Digital Platforms for Political Participation

This thesis is a comparative examination of the impacts of two so-called ‘Digital Platforms for Political Participation’ (DPPPs) — Decide Madrid and vTaiwan — on urban policymaking and citizen empowerment. DPPPs are a novel subset of digital platforms which are focused on facilitating online political participation and are designed and implemented by governmental institutions: the two cases under study here are designed by Madrid City Council and the Taiwanese government respectively. This thesis utilises what I term a situated lens, which fuses the idea of relational comparative urbanism, Deleuzian assemblage thinking and theories of empowerment. This situated lens allows me to evaluate, compare and identify the similarities in the forms of digital political participation provided by the two DPPPs under study. It does this by breaking each DPPP down into three sets of assemblages: (1) the design process; (2) the dynamic User Interface (UI); and (3) the process of algorithmic decision-making. The term ‘situated’ is coined to highlight the dynamic and mutating nature of digital political participation. Via this situated lens, I stress that digital empowerment is highly changeable, constrained and opened up by rules set at design stage, the dynamic UI, contingencies introduced by algorithmic interactions with users, and the changing human/institutional contexts in which these processes are embedded. This thesis demonstrates that my comparative study of the two DPPPs can enrich existing studies in digital urbanism and digital participation. Firstly, drawing from theories of empowerment, the situated lens allows me to indicate the level of empowerment a DPPP provides should not be seen just as the provision of a fixed static set of participatory capacities. Rather, a DPPP should be seen as a fluid space in which empowerment is present to a greater or lesser extent, affected by a fast-moving environment in which a user can be disabled or enabled in making informed and collective decisions due to various contingencies (such as the dynamic UI and the processes of user data interacting with algorithms to produce decisions). The wider institutional context also drives this fluidity: the citizen/user’s ability to impact on policymaking through reaching collective decisions through DPPPs is constrained or promoted by subsequent processes of governmental allocation of political legitimacy and resources. Secondly, the situated lens offers a new view in digital urbanism, by deploying an innovative hybrid method to produce ‘flashbacks’ on specific processes of digital political participation. In doing so it reveals and question the ways in which political decisions on legitimating urban issues are mutably (re)configured by algorithmic interactions with users and by subsequent human interpretation in institutional policymaking processes. This serves to question what constitutes fairer and more empowered political decisions by pointing out exclusions which emerge during the decision-making processes of DPPPs

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

Digital Roots

Several of the most known and discussed concepts of the digital age predated the digitalization itself and have been previously used in the “analogue times”. Other concepts were coined for the digital society but have transformed and are continuously transforming over time. This edited book selects some of these concepts and starts a time travel through their history, heritage, reinvention, and reinvestment in media and communication studies

Digital Roots

Several of the most known and discussed concepts of the digital age predated the digitalization itself and have been previously used in the “analogue times”. Other concepts were coined for the digital society but have transformed and are continuously transforming over time. This edited book selects some of these concepts and starts a time travel through their history, heritage, reinvention, and reinvestment in media and communication studies

The design, development and evaluation of cross-platform mobile applications and services supporting social accountability monitoring

Local government processes require meaningful and effective participation from both citizens and their governments in order to remain truly democratic. This project investigates the use of mobile phones as a tool for supporting this participation. MobiSAM, a system which aims to enhance the Social Accountability Monitoring (SAM) methodology at local government level, has been designed and implemented. The research presented in this thesis examines tools and techniques for the development of cross-platform client applications, allowing access to the MobiSAM service, across heterogeneous mobile platforms, handsets and interaction styles. Particular attention is paid to providing an easily navigated user interface (UI), as well as offering clear and concise visualisation capabilities. Depending on the host device, interactivity is also included within these visualisations, potentially helping provide further insight into the visualised data. Guided by the results obtained from a comprehensive baseline study of the Grahamstown area, steps are taken in an attempt to lower the barrier of entry to using the MobiSAM service, potentially maximising its market reach. These include extending client application support to all identified mobile platforms (including feature phones); providing multi-language UIs (in English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans); as well as ensuring client application data usage is kept to a minimum. The particular strengths of a given device are also leveraged, such as its camera capabilities and built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) module, potentially allowing for more effective engagement with local municipalities. Additionally, a Short Message Service (SMS) gateway is developed, allowing all Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) compatible handsets access to the MobiSAM service via traditional SMS. Following an iterative, user-centred design process, a thorough evaluation of the client application is also performed, in an attempt to gather feedback relating to the navigation and visualisation capabilities. The results of which are used to further refine its design. A comparative usability evaluation using two different versions of the cross-platform client application is also undertaken, highlighting the perceived memorability, learnabilitv and satisfaction of each. Results from the evaluation reveals which version of the client application is to be deployed during future pilot studies

Comparative study of international marketing strategy of Japanese and Taiwanese CNC machine tool industry in the Asean region

Abstract only in hardbound copy