Culture in the design of mHealth UI:An effort to increase acceptance among culturally specific groups

Purpose: Designers of mobile applications have long understood the importance of users’ preferences in making the user experience easier, convenient and therefore valuable. The cultural aspects of groups of users are among the key features of users’ design preferences, because each group’s preferences depend on various features that are culturally compatible. The process of integrating culture into the design of a system has always been an important ingredient for effective and interactive human computer interface. This study aims to investigate the design of a mobile health (mHealth) application user interface (UI) based on Arabic culture. It was argued that integrating certain cultural values of specific groups of users into the design of UI would increase their acceptance of the technology. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 135 users responded to an online survey about their acceptance of a culturally designed mHealth. Findings: The findings showed that culturally based language, colours, layout and images had a significant relationship with users’ behavioural intention to use the culturally based mHealth UI. Research limitations/implications: First, the sample and the data collected of this study were restricted to Arab users and Arab culture; therefore, the results cannot be generalized to other cultures and users. Second, the adapted unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model was used in this study instead of the new version, which may expose new perceptions. Third, the cultural aspects of UI design in this study were limited to the images, colours, language and layout. Practical implications: It encourages UI designers to implement the relevant cultural aspects while developing mobile applications. Originality/value: Embedding Arab cultural aspects in designing UI for mobile applications to satisfy Arab users and enhance their acceptance toward using mobile applications, which will reflect positively on their lives.</p

Digital ethnography, resistance art and communication media in Iran

Iranian visual materials relating to the presidential election crisis have the potential to become the sites of analysis and debate for fields as diverse as history, visual history, memory and post-memory, or trauma studies. References to memory are now omnipresent in scholarly discourse and in a wider public debate: ”social memory’, “collective remembrance”, “national memory”, “public memory”, “counter memory”, “popular history making” and “lived history” jostle for attention.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A review of data visualization: opportunities in manufacturing sequence management.

Data visualization now benefits from developments in technologies that offer innovative ways of presenting complex data. Potentially these have widespread application in communicating the complex information domains typical of manufacturing sequence management environments for global enterprises. In this paper the authors review the visualization functionalities, techniques and applications reported in literature, map these to manufacturing sequence information presentation requirements and identify the opportunities available and likely development paths. Current leading-edge practice in dynamic updating and communication with suppliers is not being exploited in manufacturing sequence management; it could provide significant benefits to manufacturing business. In the context of global manufacturing operations and broad-based user communities with differing needs served by common data sets, tool functionality is generally ahead of user application

Cross-cultural representations of musical shape

In cross-cultural research involving performers from distinct cultural backgrounds (U.K., Japan, Papua New Guinea), we examined 75 musicians' associations between musical sound and shape, and saw pronounced differences between groups. Participants heard short stimuli varying in pitch contour and were asked to represent these visually on paper, with the instruction that if another community member saw the marks they should be able to connect them with the sounds. Participants from the U.K. group produced consistent symbolic representations, which involved depicting the passage of time from left-to-right. Japanese participants unfamiliar with English language and western standard notation provided responses comparable to the U.K. group's. The majority opted to use a horizontal timeline, whilst a minority of traditional Japanese musicians produced unique responses with time represented vertically. The last group, a non-literate Papua New Guinean tribe known as BenaBena, produced a majority of iconic responses which did not follow the time versus pitch contour model, but highlighted musical qualities other than the parameters intentionally varied in the investigation, focusing on hue and loudness. The participants' responses point to profoundly different 'norms' of musical shape association, which may be linked to literacy and to the functional role of music in a community

Dialectical Spaces in the Global Public Sphere: Media Memories across Generations

A decade ago, CNN and MTV emerged as new types of 'global' players, initiating and supporting a new global transnational community of 'news junkies' and music cultures from New York, to Tokyo, to Buenos Aires and Los Angeles. Today, access to international news is not only available in many countries around the world, but international channels have multiplied and created 'imagined communities' (Anderson, 1983), affecting new political alliances, conventional journalism and - increasingly - national public spheres. The following research report will discuss new issues of globalization and focus on the impact of media-related globalization processes on 'life-worlds' in various countries

Exploring Jewish forms of speaking to God : the use of apostrophe in David Rosenmann-Taub’s Cortejo y epinicio

textIn his first published collection of poetry, Cortejo y epinicio (1949), Chilean author David Rosenmann-Taub (1927) references Jewish culture, prayers and beliefs. This project seeks to foreground the Jewishness in his work, as well as the cross-cultural spaces it creates. One of the central means in which Rosenmann-Taub explores Jewish forms of relating to God is through the use of apostrophe. The first section of this essay offers a theoretical framework for discussing apostrophe in poetry and prayer. The three following sections focus on three poems – “Elegía y Kadisch,” “Gólgota,” and “Schabat” – that depict speakers talking to or about God. Their reactions range from continued pleading with God, in the hope of hearing some response, to an attempt to speak for God to a refusal to address God at all. With each section, I consider the poem alongside the Jewish prayers and conventions that serve as a reference point for the poem’s rewritten prayers to God. This comparison not only highlights the notable presence of Jewish forms in Rosenmann-Taub’s poetry, but also points to how he challenges and reframes them. Rosenmann-Taub dramatizes the thresholds between belief and disbelief, divine and earthly, to point to the construction of faith as a mode of being that collapses these boundaries. In the final section of the essay, I situate Rosenmann-Taub’s work within its historical and literary context to highlight the ways in which his inquiries resonate with other poetic works emerging in Chile at that moment in time, as well as how he builds on them by representing Jewishness, heterogeneity, and heterodoxy as part of Chilean culture.Comparative Literatur

New literacies and future educational culture

The paper draws attention to three developments that are crucial to online education. First, the new literacy required by group discussion in writing, i.e. by computer‐mediated communication ('e‐talk') is discussed Educators are urged to delimit and structure their courses so that online conversations in writing are successfully framed for effective discourse. Second, new literacy arising from the merging of multimedia with text is considered It is maintained that this will enhance communication, not debase it. Third, the way that increasing ease of information retrieval is eroding boundaries between traditional disciplines is discussed It is argued that this may create new difficulties in education. The paper recommends various ways of overcoming the problems that arise from the three developments

Orality and literacy: epic heroes of human destiny?

Human Speech has often been presented as the crucial line dividing humanity from animals, with Literacy then entering in as the fulfiller of human destiny, the redeemer from primitive orality, and, in alphabetic apotheosis, the all-conquering hero of the west's civilising mission. This epic tale, pervasive as it still remains, is now under attack from many directions, not least in the expanding work on multiple literacy practices. This paper takes the complementary line of starting from the 'oral' end of the apparent equation. Building on anthropological fieldwork, experience of teaching at the UK's Open University, and the gathering comparative literature, it questions the limiting linguistic bias of this tale – itself a kind of myth explaining and justifying the social order. Verbal language is just one of many modes and media of human communication and can only be fully understood in conjunction with them. The traditional myth also underplays the multiplex nature of language itself: researchers across several disciplines are now increasingly revealing the multimodal nature of human speech and writing. To focus on narrower definitions of language and, as in the heroic elevation of 'orality' and 'literacy', to propose the treatment of language as the crucial factor in human culture is to proffer a thin and single-line tale of human history and, with it, a misleading and ethnocentric account not only of humanity more generally but also of many of our actual educational practices. It needs to be replaced by a broader, more cross-cultural and more generous model of both learning and communication