A Network of One’s Own: Struggles to Domesticate the Internet

This thesis is a design research practice-led inquiry into the domesticated Internet. It first seeks to complicate simplistic corporate and academic visions by naming some of the struggles it encounters – not least to assert a private home and network of one's own. It is argued that a century of domestic technologies has emphasised invisibility, ubiquity, and automation in ways that obscure a network of exploited people and finite resources. Furthermore, these technological ambitions are met through machine surveillance, in ways newly enabled by the domesticated Internet, that threaten the privacy of the home. In response, this thesis seeks some practical ways to design alternatives that assert a network of one's own and makes the work it implicates visible. The methodological approach is broadly Research Through Design supplemented by a practice described as designerly hacking through which hidden technical potential is revealed and given meaning. Two empirical studies are described that together make an account of the technical possibility and social reality of the networked home: an autobiographical technical exploration of the author's home and network with the making of hacks and Research Products privately and in public; and a cultural probe engagement with six rented households surfacing contemporary accounts of the domesticated Internet and in particular the challenges and opportunities of wireless networking. Together this yields a series of technical and social insights for design and two forms are offered to communicate these: a framework for understanding change in the networked home (The Stuff of Home) and a set of 30 design patterns for a network of one's own; each invites different analyses. The conclusion then draws together the multiple threads developed through this thesis and offers some reflection on the complexity of doing contemporary technical design work

Minimising conflicts among run-time non-functional requirements within DevOps

Significant contributions in the existing literature highlight the potential of softgoal interdependency graphs towards analyzing conflicting non-functional requirements (NFRs). However, such analysis is often at a very abstract level and does not quite consider the run-time performance statistics of NFR operationalizations. On the contrary, some initial empirical evaluations demonstrate the importance of the run-time statistics. In this paper, a framework is proposed that uses these statistics and combines the same with NFR priorities for computing the impact of NFR conflicts. The proposed framework is capable of identifying the best possible set of NFR operationalizations that minimizes the impact of conflicting NFRs. A detailed space analysis of the solution framework helps proving the efficiency of the proposed pruning mechanism in terms of better space management. Furthermore, a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) - based system behavioral model that works on top of the proposed framework, is defined and analyzed. An appropriate tool prototype for the framework is implemented as part of this research

A Meta-Study and Content Analysis of Science Fiction in Computer Science Research

Ph.D

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

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 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference

Tailoring Interaction. Sensing Social Signals with Textiles.

Nonverbal behaviour is an important part of conversation and can reveal much about the nature of an interaction. It includes phenomena ranging from large-scale posture shifts to small scale nods. Capturing these often spontaneous phenomena requires unobtrusive sensing techniques that do not interfere with the interaction. We propose an underexploited sensing modality for sensing nonverbal behaviours: textiles. As a material in close contact with the body, they provide ubiquitous, large surfaces that make them a suitable soft interface. Although the literature on nonverbal communication focuses on upper body movements such as gestures, observations of multi-party, seated conversations suggest that sitting postures, leg and foot movements are also systematically related to patterns of social interaction. This thesis addressees the following questions: Can the textiles surrounding us measure social engagement? Can they tell who is speaking, and who, if anyone, is listening? Furthermore, how should wearable textile sensing systems be designed and what behavioural signals could textiles reveal? To address these questions, we have designed and manufactured bespoke chairs and trousers with integrated textile pressure sensors, that are introduced here. The designs are evaluated in three user studies that produce multi-modal datasets for the exploration of fine-grained interactional signals. Two approaches to using these bespoke textile sensors are explored. First, hand crafted sensor patches in chair covers serve to distinguish speakers and listeners. Second, a pressure sensitive matrix in custom-made smart trousers is developed to detect static sitting postures, dynamic bodily movement, as well as basic conversational states. Statistical analyses, machine learning approaches, and ethnographic methods show that by moni- toring patterns of pressure change alone it is possible to not only classify postures with high accuracy, but also to identify a wide range of behaviours reliably in individuals and groups. These findings es- tablish textiles as a novel, wearable sensing system for applications in social sciences, and contribute towards a better understanding of nonverbal communication, especially the significance of posture shifts when seated. If chairs know who is speaking, if our trousers can capture our social engagement, what role can smart textiles have in the future of human interaction? How can we build new ways to map social ecologies and tailor interactions