Service Interaction Flow Analysis Technique for Service Personalization

Abstract Service interaction flows are difficult to capture, analyze, outline, and represent for research and design purposes. We examine how variation of personalized service flows in technology-mediated service interaction can be modeled and analyzed to provide information on how service personalization could support interaction. We have analyzed service interaction cases in a context of technology-mediated car rental service. With the analysis technique we propose, inspired by Interaction Analysis method, we were able to capture and model the situational service interaction. Our contribution regarding technology-mediated service interaction design is twofold: First, with the increased understanding on the role of personalization in managing variation in technology-mediated service interaction, our study contributes to designing service management information systems and human-computer interfaces that support personalized service interaction flows. Second, we provide a new analysis technique for situated interaction analysis, particularly when the aim is to understand personalization in service interaction flows

The Role of Users in Prototypical and Infrastructural Systems Design

This theoretical study examines the role of users in an infrastructural systems design. We analyzed different perspectives and used theories on infrastructure, long-term factors in infrastructure, and the role of users in infrastructural systems design. By doing this we demonstrated how prototypical design has been used in infrastructural systems design and how the users’ role has been taken into account. This study summarizes infrastructuring modes, purposes, activities, and methods and also offers both theoretical and practical contributions. First, we offer a new view on prototypical design as it is conceptualized for infrastructural systems design. Second, as a practical contribution, this study provides valuable knowledge to end users and domain and information systems practitioners, especially regarding how information systems artefacts can contribute to infrastructural design and vice versa

A systematic mapping study of HCI practice research

Human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has emerged as a research domain in the HCI field and is growing. The need to transfer HCI practices to the industry began significantly with the works of Nielsen on usability engineering. To date, methods and techniques for designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use have continued to emerge. It is, therefore, justified to conduct a systematic mapping study to determine the landscape of HCI practice research. A Systematic Mapping Study method was used to map 142 studies according to research type, topic, and contribution. These were then analyzed to determine an overview of HCI practice research. The objective was to analyze studies on HCI practice and present prominent issues that characterize the HCI practice research landscape. Second, to identify pressing challenges regarding HCI practices in software/systems development companies. The results show that HCI practice research has steadily increased since 2012. The majority of the studies explored focused on evaluation research that largely contributed to the evaluation methods or processes. Most of the studies were on design tools and techniques, design methods and contexts, design work and organizational culture, and collaboration and team communication. Interviews, case studies, and survey methods have been prominently used as research methods. HCI techniques are mostly used during the initial phase of development and during evaluation. HCI practice challenges in companies are mostly process-related and on performance of usability and user experience activities. The major challenge seems to be to find a way to collect and incorporate user feedback in a timely manner, especially in agile processes. There are areas identified in this study as needing more research

(Meta)Modeling "Constitutive Communication": Toward a Real-Time Reflexive Infrastructure for Coordination and Codesign

This thesis explores the complex relationship between communication and design practice as they occur within the development of technologies. Contemporary theories of communication and technology provide a conceptual basis for treating communication and design as reflexive structuring acts that change the affordances of an interaction situation while embedded within an environment that constitutes the situation. Drawing upon some of these theories, a design research project is undertaken to define a general infrastructure for real-time interaction that affords users reflexive capabilities for redesigning and restructuring the relational situation from within. The design solution developed here proposes a variety of strategies to model the emergence, complexity, and multiplicity of objects as the negotiated outcomes of situated human-computer interactions. In order to consider the feasibility of this design, an inquiry is performed to assess contemporary approaches to reflexive infrastructure for real-time interaction. Various existing collaboration and coordination frameworks and support environments are examined that articulate solutions to elements of the problem space outlined in this thesis. The analysis focuses on the place-based and activity-based approaches to representing dynamic interaction situations exemplified by the research systems Orbit and Intermezzo. The way that these approaches enable and constrain the development of dynamic interaction situations provides a ground for considering the feasibility of the proposed mechanisms as means for reflexively modeling responsive emergence. The design research project undertaken here results in a more concrete proposal for design of infrastructures that reflexively model complex relationality and support emergent forms of coordination and codesign.</p

Occupying Time: Design, technology, and the form of interaction

As technology pervades our everyday life and material culture, new possibilities and problematics are raised for design. Attention in contemporary design discourse is shifting ‘beyond the object’, to the qualities of processes and experiences. The boxes and screens typically the ‘object’ of interaction and interface design are m­iniaturizing, even disappearing, as computation is integrated into familiar materials and o­rdinary o­bjects. This opens possibilities – for example, as computer and materials s­cience converge with fashion and architecture in smart textiles and intelligent environ­ments – even as it turns us back, in new ways, to traditional design disciplines and practices. In this context, design is not only about the spatial or physical form of objects, but the form of interactions that take place – and occupy time – in people’s relations with and through computational and interactive objects. As argued in this thesis, a central, and particular, concern of interaction design must therefore be the ‘temporal form’ of such objects and the ‘form of interaction’ as they are used over time. Furthermore, increasingly pervasive technology means that the temporality of form and interaction is implicated in more widespread changes to the material conditions of design and of society. Challenging conventions – of ‘formalism’ and ‘functionalism’, ‘good’ and ‘total’ design­ – temporal concerns and implications require new ways of thinking about and working with the materiality, users, and effects of design. Located at an intersection between emerging technologies and design traditions, interaction design is approached in ‘Occupying Time’ through diverse disciplinary frames and scales of consideration. If focus in interaction design is typically on proximate ‘Use’, here a discussion of ‘Materials’ scales down to reconsider the more basic spatial and temporal composition of form, and ‘Change’ scales up to large-scale and long-term design effects. To anchor these themes in existing discourse and practice, architecture is a p­rimary frame of reference throughout to explore certain problematics. Accounts of ‘event’, ‘vernacular’, and ‘non-design’, and concepts of ‘becoming’, ‘in the making’, and ‘futurity’, thus extend a theoretical and practical basis for treating time in (interaction) design discourse. Implications for practice also emerge and are discusssed. Basic to the materiality of interaction design, technology puts time central to ‘M­aterial practice’. ‘Participatory practice’ moves beyond user i­nvolvement in design processes to participation in ongoing formation. Since t­emporal form extends design more deeply and further into future use, ‘Critical practice’ e­xamines effects and responsibility. More specific and concrete reflections are situated in relation to my experience in the design research programs ‘IT+Textiles’, ‘Public Play Spaces’, and ‘Static!’. Drawing from architectural discourse and from my own practice, this thesis maps out and builds up a territory of ideas, relations, and examples as an inquiry into issues of time in interaction design

A City in Common: Explorations on Sustained Community Engagement with Bottom-up Civic Technologies

Large technology companies and city councils are increasingly developing smart city programmes: augmenting urban environments with smart and ubiquitous computing devices, to transform how cities are run. At a smaller scale, communities of citizens are appropriating technologies to tackle matters of concern and to effect positive change from the bottom-up. HCI researchers are also deploying civic technology in the wild, sometimes collaborating with these communities, in the pursuit of both scientific and societal impact. However, little is known about how impactful they have been, and the extent to which they have meaningfully engaged communities in the long term. The goal of this PhD is to identify the factors that can guide the design and deployment of engaging, sustainable and impactful civic technology interventions, from the perspective of the communities that they are intended to benefit. Three case studies are presented: an ethnographic study of an existing civic technology, and two design and evaluation studies of novel interventions. A set of themes was derived from the studies that highlight factors that are positively associated to engagement, sustainability and impact. Based on these themes and on experience from deploying interventions, a framework was developed and validated. It comprises six key phases: identification of matters of concern, framing, co-design of community technologies, deployment, orchestration, and evaluation. In line with a new wave of civically engaged HCI and participatory methods, the framework puts people at the heart of socio-technical innovation and technology in the service of the common good by fostering the development of a commons: a pool of community managed resources. Using this approach, the thesis explores how researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, city councils and communities can collaborate to address community issues using digital technologies. It further suggests how citizens can be supported to develop skills that will allow them to appropriate the intervention for their own situated purposes