The Meeting Journey: Supporting the Design of Interaction Within Co-located, Collaborative Device Ecologies

The combination of personal and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) technologies with augmented "smart" spaces designed for collaborative work offers new design challenges for the HCI community. This thesis looks at how BYOD technologies can integrate with such spaces in the context of cross-channel collaboration, from a user experience (UX) perspective. In addition to this, the work looks at how BYOD technologies can replace smart spaces entirely and form space-agnostic collaborative device ecologies. A series of qualitative empirical studies were undertaken that led to the development of the concept of a meeting journey. The meeting journey is an abstract representation of the different steps, tools and activities undertaken by users in the context of a co- located collaborative activity aimed to inform the design of such systems. The meeting journey helped define a series of design principles for collaborative device ecologies. Whilst the longitudinal aspects of collaboration have been well covered by work in the area of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and supported by a number of commercial products, the UX of co-located ad hoc meetings have not. Such meetings are still characterised by difficult and awkward interactions due to different technologies, levels of computer literacy and processes. The concept proposed to improve the desirability of collaborative device ecologies following the design principles previously defined is based on a hybrid approach, built on an extensible framework nicknamed “OIL”. The sharing activities specific to ad hoc collaborative meetings are delegated to a consistent user interface, whilst the ecology retains a platform-agnostic philosophy as to which applications and devices are used by the participants. The final part of the thesis relates the development of a proof-of-concept hybrid system inspired by OIL, and its evaluation using desirability metrics. This leads to a discussion of the possibilities of extensions to the proof of concept, including support for more steps of the meeting journey, a broader set of functionalities, and a broader range of issues such as security and data ownership

Enactivism and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as tools for expanding Universal Design for Learning: the case of visually impaired mathematics students

Blind and visually impaired mathematics students must rely on accessible materials such as tactile diagrams to learn mathematics. However, these compensatory materials are frequently found to offer students inferior opportunities for engaging in mathematical practice and do not allow sensorily heterogenous students to collaborate. Such prevailing problems of access and interaction are central concerns of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an engineering paradigm for inclusive participation in cultural praxis like mathematics. Rather than directly adapt existing artifacts for broader usage, UDL process begins by interrogating the praxis these artifacts serve and then radically re-imagining tools and ecologies to optimize usability for all learners. We argue for the utility of two additional frameworks to enhance UDL efforts: (a) enactivism, a cognitive-sciences view of learning, knowing, and reasoning as modal activity; and (b) ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA), which investigates participants’ multimodal methods for coordinating action and meaning. Combined, these approaches help frame the design and evaluation of opportunities for heterogeneous students to learn mathematics collaboratively in inclusive classrooms by coordinating perceptuo-motor solutions to joint manipulation problems. We contextualize the thesis with a proposal for a pluralist design for proportions, in which a pair of students jointly operate an interactive technological device

On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces

© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe

Activity-Centric Computing Systems

• Activity-Centric Computing (ACC) addresses deep-rooted information management problems in traditional application centric computing by providing a unifying computational model for human goal-oriented ‘activity,’ cutting across system boundaries. • We provide a historical review of the motivation for and development of ACC systems, and highlight the need for broadening up this research topic to also include low-level system research and development. • ACC concepts and technology relate to many facets of computing; they are relevant for researchers working on new computing models and operating systems, as well as for application designers seeking to incorporate these technologies in domain-specific applications

Moving Composition: Writing in a Mobile World

We live in an increasingly mobile society on many levels. Mobile devices, including the smartphone, tablet, and wearables, allow for composing and communicating from anywhere and in new ways, a phenomenon that is especially deserving of attention by composition studies scholars and teachers. Mobile composition processes are impacted by the symmetry of humans and technology as each equally shapes one another. This interplay of mobile devices (including wearables) and humans impacts composition ecologies, processes, and definitions of writing. The role of analog mobile writers also informs our current practices and approaches to a mobile composition as many writers have sought to write on the move. Educational researchers identify mobile learning as unique with attributes not afforded in analog or tethered learning environments. Mobile composition is poised to take advantage of the authentic, collaborative, and new opportunities for making meaning that exist in this form of teaching and learning. Mobile composition also transcends the literature from established composition studies and mobile learning frameworks by residing and inventing the burgeoning digital apparatus, electracy, that follows and extends the practices of oral and literate civilizations. Electracy\u27s teaching and learning corollary, post(e)-pedagogy, offers ways to make use of mobile devices in this new framework. Finally, this dissertation project includes a mobile composition course prototype that models a post(e)-pedagogical approach and encourages further critical exploration and invention of communication practices with mobile devices, especially by composition faculty and students but in higher education overall

Information and communication in a networked infosphere: a review of concepts and application in social branding

This paper aims at providing a contribution to the comprehensive review of the impact of information and communication, and their supporting technologies, in the current transformation of human life in the infosphere. The paper also offers an ex- ample of the power of new social approaches to the use of information and commu- nication technologies to foster new working models in organizations by presenting the main outcomes of a research project on social branding. A discussion about some trends of the future impact of new information and communication technologies in the infosphere is also included

Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience

Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies