A fieldwork of the future with user enactments

Designing radically new technology systems that people will want to use is complex. Design teams must draw on knowledge related to people’s current values and desires to envision a preferred yet plausible future. However, the introduction of new technology can shape people’s values and practices, and what-we-know-now about them does not always translate to an effective guess of what the future could, or should, be. New products and systems typically exist outside of current understandings of technology and use paradigms; they often have few interaction and social conventions to guide the design process, making efforts to pursue them complex and risky. User Enactments (UEs) have been developed as a design approach that aids design teams in more successfully investigate radical alterations to technologies ’ roles, forms, and behaviors in uncharted design spaces. In this paper, we reflect on our repeated use of UE over the past five years to unpack lessons learned and further specify how and when to use it. We conclude with a reflection on how UE can function as a boundary object and implications for future work

News and Radio: Social Media Adoption and Integration by @RadioProducers and its Impact on Their #MediaWork

This research analyses how news talk radio program producers are using social media in their daily work practices and routines, and how doing so has impacted on their media work. Currently, the majority of scholarly attention has focused on the apparent crisis facing print media in light of continuous technological innovations in newsrooms, as a condition of media convergence. However, there has been significantly less scholarship considering how the introduction of various Internet and new media technologies has impacted on radio broadcasting. Structural transformations of the radio industry have triggered workplace shifts in news talk production that has altered the media work of radio program producers. It is therefore the aim of this thesis to explore the changing nature of radio work, and the way in which news talk radio producers adopt and integrate Internet and new media technologies into their daily work practices and routines. This research examines the use of Internet and new media technologies by three news talk program production teams within the community, commercial, and public service broadcasting sectors in order to explore how each have taken to social media in their daily workflows. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with each of the radio producers, the research uses an inductive ethnographic research methodology to understand the technology access and workload challenges they are facing in developing social media skills, particularly concerning program pre-promotion and audience interaction. The research indicates that access to reliable computing technologies is a contentious issue amongst the commercial and community radio stations observed and which ultimately impacts upon the radio producers’ ability to effectively complete their daily media work. Further, the research indicates that the workload of each of the producers has increased significantly with their incorporation and adoption of social media in their daily workflows. The study suggests that further research is necessary in order to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the changing nature of media work within radio production

News and Radio: Social Media Adoption and Integration by @RadioProducers and its Impact on Their #MediaWork

This research analyses how news talk radio program producers are using social media in their daily work practices and routines, and how doing so has impacted on their media work. Currently, the majority of scholarly attention has focused on the apparent crisis facing print media in light of continuous technological innovations in newsrooms, as a condition of media convergence. However, there has been significantly less scholarship considering how the introduction of various Internet and new media technologies has impacted on radio broadcasting. Structural transformations of the radio industry have triggered workplace shifts in news talk production that has altered the media work of radio program producers. It is therefore the aim of this thesis to explore the changing nature of radio work, and the way in which news talk radio producers adopt and integrate Internet and new media technologies into their daily work practices and routines. This research examines the use of Internet and new media technologies by three news talk program production teams within the community, commercial, and public service broadcasting sectors in order to explore how each have taken to social media in their daily workflows. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with each of the radio producers, the research uses an inductive ethnographic research methodology to understand the technology access and workload challenges they are facing in developing social media skills, particularly concerning program pre-promotion and audience interaction. The research indicates that access to reliable computing technologies is a contentious issue amongst the commercial and community radio stations observed and which ultimately impacts upon the radio producers’ ability to effectively complete their daily media work. Further, the research indicates that the workload of each of the producers has increased significantly with their incorporation and adoption of social media in their daily workflows. The study suggests that further research is necessary in order to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the changing nature of media work within radio production

Advocacy for People with Learning Difficulties: The Role of Two Organisations

This thesis is about advocacy for people with learning difficulties. It has been undertaken through a detailed study of two different types of advocacy organisations - People's Voices (a situation-based, one-to-one advocacy group) and Talkback (a self-advocacy group). Both organisations are based in Buckinghamshire. The research had two main aims. The first was to explore the values, principles and theories that underpin the work of advocacy organisations, and to consider how they are borne out in practice. This required a thorough analysis of organisational processes and relationships between group members. The second aim was to assess how advocacy organisations interact with and are shaped by the wider environment. This involved an in-depth examination of the local (historical and socio-political) context, as well as relations between the groups and external stakeholders - in particular, statutory bodies. The research found that although members of advocacy groups are generally inspired by a similar vision, ideas about how this might be achieved varied among respondents. Whilst the groups were guided by a strong set of values and principles, these were sometimes difficult to implement in practice - particularly with regard to how advocacy organisations are run. The thesis also showed that whilst advocacy organisations can and do direct their own agenda, they also face pressures from the wider environment - most notably through commissioning arrangements. In this way the thesis shed light upon wider questions concerning the relationship between statutory bodies and the voluntary sector, in the health and social care field in England. The research revealed the complexity of advocacy organisations, and highlighted the need for more in-depth, localised studies

Teaching competence : A personal construct view

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Attempts to incorporate all the views of competence and quality in teaching into definitive check lists of behaviours are doomed to failure, despite the current political pressure to constrain the assessment of teaching. The reflective process in education, expressed through PCP and Self-Organised-Learning is discussed and located within the competence debate in teaching and current models of competence. The value of a conversational and reflective approach in the assessment and understanding of teaching is stressed. Twelve members of staff engaged in teacher training completed a SPACed-FOCUSed repertory grid and their personal constructs of teaching competence at the end of a four year B.Ed course were elicited. A further reiterative process of review reflection and structures of meaning exercises resulted in the production of an initial set of criteria of competence that represented the staff group#s construct dimensions. The initial criteria set was applied to students undertaking their final teaching practice and the results fed back to the staff in the form of a feedback for learning exercise. This application is compared with a review undertaken as part of a conversational methodology. Three further groups followed a broadly similar pattern to that of the staff group - Students; Newly Qualified Teachers and their Mentors. with each undertaking a group repertory grid exercise. The constructs/elements elicited lead to a criteria or competency set for each group. Comparisons are drawn between all groups, and a detailed analysis is made of each group's responses with Circular 14/93 (DFE 1993A). Recommendations for future practice are made which return to the central theme that criteria or competency sets alone cannot adequately describe the complex set of activities that is called teaching. Profiling approaches, different forms of evidence and professional development portfolios are proposed as some alternatives and additions to present practice. The final chapter reviews the author's personal learning prior to and during the research process. Influences are discussed, and critical incidents listed and analysed through a SPACed-FOCUSed repertory grid employing a conversational and reflexive processs that mirrors the study methodology

Design as interactions of problem framing and problem solving: a formal and empirical basis for problem framing in design

In this thesis, I present, illustrate and empirically validate a novel approach to modelling and explaining design process. The main outcome of this work is the formal definition of the problem framing, and the formulation of a recursive model of framing in design. The model (code-named RFD), represents a formalisation of a grey area in the science of design, and sees the design process as a recursive interaction of problem framing and problem solving. The proposed approach is based upon a phenomenon introduced in cognitive science and known as (reflective) solution talkback. Previously, there were no formalisations of the knowledge interactions occurring within this complex reasoning operation. The recursive model is thus an attempt to express the existing knowledge in a formal and structured manner. In spite of rather abstract, knowledge level on which the model is defined, it is a firm step in the clarification of design process. The RFD model is applied to the knowledge-level description of the conducted experimental study that is annotated and analysed in the defined terminology. Eventually, several schemas implied by the model are identified, exemplified, and elaborated to reflect the empirical results. The model features the mutual interaction of predicates ‘specifies’ and ‘satisfies’. The first asserts that a certain set of explicit statements is sufficient for expressing relevant desired states the design is aiming to achieve. The validity of predicate ‘specifies’ might not be provable directly in any problem solving theory. A particular specification can be upheld or rejected only by drawing upon the validity of a complementary predicate ‘satisfies’ and the (un-)acceptability of the considered candidate solution (e.g. technological artefact, product). It is the role of the predicate ‘satisfies’ to find and derive such a candidate solution. The predicates ‘specifies’ and ‘satisfies’ are contextually bound and can be evaluated only within a particular conceptual frame. Thus, a solution to the design problem is sound and admissible with respect to an explicit commitment to a particular specification and design frame. The role of the predicate ‘acceptable’ is to compare the admissible solutions and frames against the ‘real’ design problem. As if it answered the question: “Is this solution really what I wanted/intended?” Furthermore, I propose a set of principled schemas on the conceptual (knowledge) level with an aim to make the interactive patterns of the design process explicit. These conceptual schemas are elicited from the rigorous experiments that utilised the structured and principled approach to recording the designer’s conceptual reasoning steps and decisions. They include the refinement of an explicit problem specification within a conceptual frame; the refinement of an explicit problem specification using a re-framed reference; and the conceptual re-framing (i.e. the identification and articulation of new conceptual terms) Since the conceptual schemas reflect the sequence of the ‘typical’ decisions the designer may make during the design process, there is no single, symbol-level method for the implementation of these conceptual patterns. Thus, when one decides to follow the abstract patterns and schemas, this abstract model alone can foster a principled design on the knowledge level. It must be acknowledged that for the purpose of computer-based support, these abstract schemas need to be turned into operational models and consequently suitable methods. However, such operational perspective was beyond the time and resource constraints placed on this research

Representational transformations : using maps to write essays

This research was supported by NSERC (The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) RGPIN-2020-04401 and EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) EP/T518062/1.Essay-writing is a complex, cognitively demanding activity. Essay-writers must synthesise source texts and original ideas into a textual essay. Previous work found that writers produce better essays when they create effective intermediate representations. Diagrams, such as concept maps and argument maps, are particularly effective. However, there is insufficient knowledge about how people use these intermediate representations in their essay-writing workflow. Understanding these processes is critical to inform the design of tools to support workflows incorporating intermediate representations. We present the findings of a study, in which 20 students planned and wrote essays. Participants used a tool that we developed, Write Reason, which combines a free-form mapping interface with an essay-writing interface. This let us observe the types of intermediate representations participants built, and crucially, the process of how they used and moved between them. The key insight is that much of the important cognitive processing did not happen within a single representation, but instead in the processes that moved between multiple representations. We label these processes `representational transformations'. Our analysis characterises key properties of these transformations: cardinality, explicitness, and change in representation type. We also discuss research questions surfaced by the focus on transformations, and implications for tool designers.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe