Workplace Surfaces as Resource for Social Interactions

Space and spatial arrangements play an important role in our everyday social interactions. The way we use and manage our surrounding space is not coincidental, on the contrary, it reflects the way we think, plan and act. Within collaborative contexts, its ability to support social activities makes space an important component of human cognition in the post-cognitive era. As technology designers, we can learn a lot by rigorously understanding the role of space for the purpose of designing collaborative systems. In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study on the use of workplace surfaces in design studios. We introduce the idea of artful surfaces. Artful surfaces are full of informative, inspirational and creative artefacts that help designers accomplish their everyday design practices. The way these surfaces are created and used could provide information about how designers work. Using examples from our fieldwork, we show that artful surfaces have both functional and inspirational characteristics. We indentify four types of artful surfaces: personal, shared, project-specific and live surfaces. We believe that a greater insight into how these artful surfaces are created and used could lead to better design of novel display technologies to support designers' everyday work

Knowledge-Intensive Processes: Characteristics, Requirements and Analysis of Contemporary Approaches

Engineering of knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) is far from being mastered, since they are genuinely knowledge- and data-centric, and require substantial flexibility, at both design- and run-time. In this work, starting from a scientific literature analysis in the area of KiPs and from three real-world domains and application scenarios, we provide a precise characterization of KiPs. Furthermore, we devise some general requirements related to KiPs management and execution. Such requirements contribute to the definition of an evaluation framework to assess current system support for KiPs. To this end, we present a critical analysis on a number of existing process-oriented approaches by discussing their efficacy against the requirements

Foundation Chief Executives as Artful Jugglers

Hundreds of thousands of books have been written about business leadership, with new titles coming out each year. There is a growing literature about what it takes to build and lead high-performing nonprofit organizations, and a trove of research and writing exists on military and political leadership. Precious little has been written, however, about what it takes to successfully lead a philanthropic organization. While a number of good books about philanthropy have been published lately, each touches only lightly on the subject of leadership, and none focus much attention on the role of the CEO. A recent National Center for Family Philanthropy report about the role of the CEO in a family foundation context makes an important descriptive contribution to the field, but there is room for more research and insight into what it takes to be a successful foundation CEO. In the past two decades, the number of foundations in the United States alone has more than tripled, rising from about 32,000 foundations in 1990 to approximately 115,000 today. Given the proliferation of foundations, and the hundreds of billions of dollars in assets that foundations control, it is essential to ask: What makes foundation CEOs successful? What makes them fail

Friendly chimeras: the evolution of critical creative practice in exhibition design

This paper aims to develop and articulate an historical perspective on the relationships between exhibition design, academic endeavour in the humanities and professional development. It reflects on design culture and educational philosophy and traces the recent history of curriculum development in exhibition design. The exhibition design course at University of Lincoln has a sixty-year history. Reviewing the way its philosophy has evolved reveals a consistently dynamic reflection of real-world interests. This has involved a pragmatic and somewhat eclectic appropriation of theory, particularly from the expanding field of museology, and its integration into an increasingly critical mode of creative practice. When the course became an undergraduate honours degree in 1991 the �project rationale� was introduced as an alternative to the traditional undergraduate dissertation. The principle of integrating theory and practice proved enormously successful and now applies throughout the curriculum. Discourse analysis is applied to articles and course documents from the period 1970 to 1999. Bibliographical survey is also used to analyse the range and type of literature used to support students� studies. This is set against a background of influences on the exhibition design curriculum. These include contemporary changes in design practice, the growth of research into and for design, and changes in the national and institutional frameworks for course development. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the role of the humanities in exhibition design creativity and highlights outstanding issues in the discipline

The Pope John Center: Labor, Delivery and the First Decade

Roll 26. Lodger's Caroling / Fr. Klubertanz. Image 1 of 7. (18 December, 1952; 22 December, 1952) [PHO 1.26.6]The Boleslaus Lukaszewski (Father Luke) Photographs contain more than 28,000 images of Saint Louis University people, activities, and events between 1951 and 1970. The photographs were taken by Boleslaus Lukaszewski (Father Luke), a Jesuit priest and member of the University's Philosophy Department faculty

‘Walking ... just walking’: how children and young people’s everyday pedestrian practices matter

In this paper we consider the importance of ‘walking… just walking’ for many children and young people’s everyday lives. We will show how, in our research with 175 9-16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, some particular (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) forms of walking were central to the lives, experiences and friendships of most children and young people. The main body of the paper highlights key characteristics of these walking practices, and their constitutive role in these children and young people’s social and cultural geography. Over the course of the paper we will argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require us to think critically about two bodies of geographical and social scientific research. On one hand, we will argue that the large body of research on children’s spatial range and independent mobility could be conceptually enlivened and extended to acknowledge bodily, social, sociotechnical and habitual practices. On the other hand, we will suggest that the empirical details of such practices should prompt critical reflection upon the wonderfully rich, multidisciplinary vein of conceptualisation latterly termed ‘new walking studies’ (Lorimer 2011). Indeed, in conclusion we shall argue that the theoretical vivacity of walking studies, and the concerns of more applied empirical approaches such as work on children’s independent mobility, could productively be interrelated. In so doing we open out a wider challenge to social and cultural geographers, to expedite this kind of interrelation in other research contexts

VERTO: a visual notation for declarative process models

Declarative approaches to business process modeling allow to represent loosely-structured (declarative) processes in flexible scenarios as a set of constraints on the allowed flow of activities. However, current graphical notations for declarative processes are difficult to interpret. As a consequence, this has affected widespread usage of such notations, by increasing the dependency on experts to understand their semantics. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing a novel visual declarative notation targeted to a more understandable modeling of declarative processes

Arts across the curriculum: enhancing pupil learning, the pupil perspective

Paper presented to the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Annual Conference, held at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh