Seamful interweaving: heterogeneity in the theory and design of interactive systems

Design experience and theoretical discussion suggest that a narrow design focus on one tool or medium as primary may clash with the way that everyday activity involves the interweaving and combination of many heterogeneous media. Interaction may become seamless and unproblematic, even if the differences, boundaries and 'seams' in media are objectively perceivable. People accommodate and take advantage of seams and heterogeneity, in and through the process of interaction. We use an experiment with a mixed reality system to ground and detail our discussion of seamful design, which takes account of this process, and theory that reflects and informs such design. We critique the 'disappearance' mentioned by Weiser as a goal for ubicomp, and Dourish's 'embodied interaction' approach to HCI, suggesting that these design ideals may be unachievable or incomplete because they underemphasise the interdependence of 'invisible' non-rationalising interaction and focused rationalising interaction within ongoing activity

StreamOnTheFly: a network for radio content dissemination

A distributed digital library has been designed and implemented for the support of community radios. This framework, developed by the StreamOn- TheFly IST project of the EU, provides a common background for preparation, archival, exchange and reuse of radio programs and supports radio personalization. The architecture is based on a decentralized network of software components using automatic metadata replication in a peer-to-peer manner. This approach combines the principles and practice of OAI (Open Archives Initiative) with the peer-to-peer networking paradigm, and extends usual content dissemination with the aggregation of use statistics and user feedback. The network also promotes social self-organization of the community and a new common metadata schema and content exchange format

Bringing Discourse Ethics to Value Sensitive Design: Pathways toward a Deliberative Future

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is a comprehensive framework for advancing a value-centered research and design agenda. It provides methods for producing and evaluating a design outcome by taking human values into account. Drawing on discourse ethics, this paper first critically analyzes the status quo in VSD and identifies some gaps. These mainly concern the lack of explicit methods for supporting a deliberative and legitimate process of decision making with respect to many concerns, including the identification of stakeholders, the legitimation of common design communication, the justification of trade-offs and/or a common regulation in case of competing or incommensurable values, as well as the deliberativeness of other design decisions such as the selection of design goals and means. In addition, this paper suggests ways to move VSD toward the standards of discourse ethics by drawing on the knowledge base of critical research in the Information Systems field. In particular, the suggestions concern the inclusion of a practical method for boundary critique and different types of discourses and principles as well as discourse support methods and tools for structuring participation in a way that allows participants to deal with the plurality of values, norms, goals and means deliberatively. Finally, this paper revisits a VSD case and explores the applicability of the ideas suggested

Design in practice: bridging the gap between design and use dichotomies in practice-based studies

Various trends related to technology, organizations and environment have resulted in fuzzy differences between 'design' and 'use' or 'designers' and 'end-users'. But despite the growing intricacy between the ICT design and organizational practice, the bulk of the IS literature still enact classic dichotomies “design-use”. First, in order to synthesize the current IS literature aiming at overcoming design-use dichotomies, the authors suggest two notions: Design In Use (DIU) and Design In Making (DIM). Four DIU-DIM configurations are also put forward before introducing Jean-Daniel Reynaud's Regulation Theory as a relevant framework to put them in broader sociotechnical perspective. Then, in order to test and refine the resulting theoretical framework, two case studies are presented: case A on an e-learning system in a French university, and case B on a loan management system in a Latvian bank. Lastly, the authors discuss the limitations, contributions and perspectives of this work

Effect of policy and service quality of SOCSO on client satisfaction, moderated by client knowledge

The number of complaints made by SOCSO’s clients towards SOCSO gradually increase. Therefore, the annual goals of SOCSO are not consistently achieved. The policy makers and the service providers of SOCSO need to understand the client’s perception on the quality of service offered. Thus, this research attempted to study the effect of policy and the perceived service quality of SOCSO on client satisfaction. Besides, the study also examined the moderation effect of client knowledge on client satisfaction. This study was conducted all over Malaysia through the stratification of sampling in each state of the country. Five hundred and seven questionnaires were distributed but only 384 questionnaires were usable, yielding a response rate of 75.74%. The findings revealed that there are direct relationships between policy, perceived service quality and client satisfaction. The findings also showed that client knowledge moderated the relationships between policy, perceived service quality and client satisfaction. The theoretical implications of the study is the inclusion of client knowledge as the moderator in assimilation contrast theory. The practical implication of the study is assisting the organization to rework policy structure of SOCSO which consist of deductions and compensation coverage. The study concludes with limitations and suggestions for future work while some recommendations have been made to improve client satisfaction