Materiality Matters: Exploring the use of design tools in innovation workshops with the craft and creative sector in the Northern Isles of Scotland

This paper presents initial reflections regarding the use of bespoke design tools within a series of innovation workshops carried out with practitioners and stakeholders active in the craft and creative industry sector in the Scottish Islands of Orkney and Shetland. We argue that by emphasising such bespoke material tools located in and inspired by the local landscape, history and culture, we encouraged engagement, provided space for innovation and enabled creative collectives in their goal of enhancing and sustaining the creative economy in rural geographies

The Impact of Coordination Quality on Coordination Dynamics and Team Performance: When Humans Team with Autonomy

abstract: This increasing role of highly automated and intelligent systems as team members has started a paradigm shift from human-human teaming to Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT). However, moving from human-human teaming to HAT is challenging. Teamwork requires skills that are often missing in robots and synthetic agents. It is possible that adding a synthetic agent as a team member may lead teams to demonstrate different coordination patterns resulting in differences in team cognition and ultimately team effectiveness. The theory of Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) emphasizes the importance of team interaction behaviors over the collection of individual knowledge. In this dissertation, Nonlinear Dynamical Methods (NDMs) were applied to capture characteristics of overall team coordination and communication behaviors. The findings supported the hypothesis that coordination stability is related to team performance in a nonlinear manner with optimal performance associated with moderate stability coupled with flexibility. Thus, we need to build mechanisms in HATs to demonstrate moderately stable and flexible coordination behavior to achieve team-level goals under routine and novel task conditions.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Engineering 201

Materiality Matters: Exploring the use of design tools in innovation workshops with the craft and creative sector in the Northern Isles of Scotland

This paper presents initial reflections regarding the use of bespoke design tools within a series of innovation workshops carried out with practitioners and stakeholders active in the craft and creative industry sector in the Scottish Islands of Orkney and Shetland. We argue that by emphasising such bespoke material tools located in and inspired by the local landscape, history and culture, we encouraged engagement, provided space for innovation and enabled creative collectives in their goal of enhancing and sustaining the creative economy in rural geographies

Rethinking data and rebalancing digital power

This report highlights and contextualises four cross-cutting interventions with a strong potential to reshape the digital ecosystem: 1. Transforming infrastructure into open and interoperable ecosystems. 2. Reclaiming control of data from dominant companies. 3. Rebalancing the centres of power with new (non-commercial) institutions. 4. Ensuring public participation as an essential component of technology policymaking. The interventions are multidisciplinary and they integrate legal, technological, market and governance solutions. They offer a path towards addressing present digital challenges and the possibility for a new, healthy digital ecosystem to emerge. What do we mean by a healthy digital ecosystem? One that privileges people over profit, communities over corporations, society over shareholders. And, most importantly, one where power is not held by a few large corporations, but is distributed among different and diverse models, alongside people who are represented in, and affected by the data used by those new models. The digital ecosystem we propose is balanced, accountable and sustainable, and imagines new types of infrastructure, new institutions and new governance models that can make data work for people and society. Some of these interventions can be located within (or built from) emerging and recently adopted policy initiatives, while others require the wholesale overhaul of regulatory regimes and markets. They are designed to spark ideas that political thinkers, forward-looking policymakers, researchers, civil society organisations, funders and ethical innovators in the private sector consider and respond to when designing future regulations, policies or initiatives around data use and governance. This report also acknowledges the need to prepare the ground for the more ambitious transformation of power relations in the digital ecosystem. Even a well-targeted intervention won't change the system unless it is supported by relevant institutions and behavioural change

Entrepreneurship, identity, and their overlap in the slum: an ethnographic study of the Mukuru slum in Nairobi, Kenya

This study explores the relationship between entrepreneurship and collective identity in an informal, or ‘slum’, community in Nairobi, Kenya. In Nairobi, as in cities across the Developing World, slum communities stand out as islands of poverty and neglect amidst increasingly cosmopolitan urban surroundings. Extant research, much of which centres on the so-called ‘Base of the Pyramid’ (BoP), has shown that where social groups experience levels of social and economic disadvantage which are far in excess of comparable groups, entrepreneurship is often underpinned by a strong collective orientation. This can have a profound and wide-ranging bearing on the venturing process. Slum communities, however, have yet to be considered in this research and, moreover, they remain largely neglected within the broader literature on entrepreneurship at the BoP. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during four-and-a-half months of fieldwork, I observed that collective identity was closely tied up with economic informality. Entrepreneurs believed that their community’s marginal status afforded them a de facto right to circumvent the costs of registration and taxation, considerably reducing the barriers to market entry in an environment characterised by widespread and acute resource deprivation. However, for most entrepreneurs this was the only facet of the venturing process that was permeated by collective identity. Navigating the many challenges of their market context was seen as an individual rather than a collective concern. This was observed to differ, however, among the slum’s younger generation, who, for the most part, had grown up there or moved there as adolescents. This cohort exhibited a stronger proclivity towards collaboration in entrepreneurial venturing, and their ventures were firmly rooted in dense, close-knit friendship networks. This study extends current understandings of how entrepreneurship is affected by social-group membership, particularly in a BoP context

Mechanisms Driving Digital New Venture Creation & Performance: An Insider Action Research Study of Pure Digital Entrepreneurship in EdTech

Digitisation has ushered in a new era of value creation where cross border data flows generate more economic value than traditional flows of goods. The powerful new combination of digital and traditional forms of innovation has seen several new industries branded with a ‘tech’ suffix. In the education technology sector (EdTech), which is the industry context of this research, digitisation is driving double-digit growth into a projected $240 billion industry by 2021. Yet, despite its contemporary significance, the field of entrepreneurship has paid little attention to the phenomenon of digital entrepreneurship. As several scholars observe, digitisation challenges core organising axioms of entrepreneurship, with significant implications for the new venture creation process in new sectors such as EdTech. New venture creation no longer appears to follow discrete and linear models of innovation, as spatial and temporal boundaries get compressed. Given the paradigmatic shift, this study investigates three interrelated themes. Firstly, it seeks to determine how a Pure Digital Entrepreneurship (PDE) process develops over time; and more importantly, how the journey challenges extant assumptions of the entrepreneurial process. Secondly, it strives to identify and theorise the deep structures which underlie the PDE process through mechanism-based explanations. Consequently, the study also seeks to determine the causal pathways and enablers which overtly or covertly interrelate to power new venture emergence and performance. Thirdly, it aims to offer practical guidelines for nurturing the growth of PDE ventures, and for the development of supportive ecosystems. To meet the stated objectives, this study utilises an Insider Action Research (IAR) approach to inquiry, which incorporates reflective practice, collaborative inquiry and design research for third-person knowledge production. This three-pronged approach to inquiry allows for the enactment of a PDE journey in real-time, while acquiring a holistic narrative in the ‘swampy lowlands’ of new venture creation. The findings indicate that the PDE process is differentiated by the centrality of digital artifacts in new venture ideas, which in turn result in less-bounded processes that deliver temporal efficiencies – hence, the shorter new venture creation processes than in traditional forms of entrepreneurship. Further, PDE action is defined by two interrelated events – digital product development and digital growth marketing. These events are characterised by the constant forking, merging and termination of diverse activities. Secondly, concurrent enactment and piecemeal co-creation were found to be consequential mechanisms driving temporal efficiencies in digital product development. Meanwhile, data-driven operation and flexibility combine in digital growth marketing, to form higher order mechanisms which considerably reduce the levels of task-specific and outcome uncertainties. Finally, the study finds that digital growth marketing is differentiated from traditional marketing by the critical role of algorithmic agencies in their capacity as gatekeepers. Thus, unlike traditional marketing, which emphasises customer sovereignty, digital growth marketing involves a dual focus on the needs of human and algorithmic stakeholders. Based on the findings, this research develops a pragmatic model of pure digital new venture creation and suggests critical policy guidelines for nurturing the growth of PDE ventures and ecosystems

Towards representing human behavior and decision making in Earth system models. An overview of techniques and approaches

Today, humans have a critical impact on the Earth system and vice versa, which can generate complex feedback processes between social and ecological dynamics. Integrating human behavior into formal Earth system models (ESMs), however, requires crucial modeling assumptions about actors and their goals, behavioral options, and decision rules, as well as modeling decisions regarding human social interactions and the aggregation of individuals’ behavior. Here, we review existing modeling approaches and techniques from various disciplines and schools of thought dealing with human behavior at different levels of decision making. We demonstrate modelers’ often vast degrees of freedom but also seek to make modelers aware of the often crucial consequences of seemingly innocent modeling assumptions. After discussing which socioeconomic units are potentially important for ESMs, we compare models of individual decision making that correspond to alternative behavioral theories and that make diverse modeling assumptions about individuals’ preferences, beliefs, decision rules, and foresight. We review approaches to model social interaction, covering game theoretic frameworks, models of social influence, and network models. Finally, we discuss approaches to studying how the behavior of individuals, groups, and organizations can aggregate to complex collective phenomena, discussing agent-based, statistical, and representative-agent modeling and economic macro-dynamics. We illustrate the main ingredients of modeling techniques with examples from land-use dynamics as one of the main drivers of environmental change bridging local to global scales

Rural Pupils Making their Way through the Norwegian Education System: Enablements, Constraints and Agency in a Northern Norwegian Context

This thesis focuses on pupils’ agency and their experiences with and reflections on educational choices. The theoretical framework draws on Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach as it examines parts of the educational situational logics, as well as her Three-Stage Model in which structural and cultural properties shape agents’ situations. The thesis thus explores constraints and enablements pupils face, and courses of actions that are produced through their reflexive deliberations. The thesis is based on semistructured interviews at two points in time with eighteen pupils in one rural and one urban municipality; it is supplemented by the researcher’s previous experiences and contextual knowledge. This thesis argues that rural pupils are constrained by rural demography, the centralized education system, the assimilation/colonisation of the Sámi people and a spatially and ethnically unaware curriculum. Local opportunities’ structures, to some extent, enable rural pupils. In addition, their decision-making capabilities enable them to navigate within existing structures. In Archer’s theory, spatial contexts are not entirely explicit; the way spatial constraints and enablements are actualised in specific structural contexts can be further developed. Theoretically, this thesis engages with spatial contexts in addressing structural constraints and enablements. It emphasises space within Archer’s theoretical framework, as spatial properties produce unequal conditions for education.Avhandlinga setter søkelys på elevers aktørskap og deres erfaringer med, og refleksjoner omkring valg av utdanning. Det teoretiske rammeverket bygger på Margaret Archers morfogenetiske tilnærming. Rammeverket benyttes for å undersøke enkelte aspekter ved utdanningens situasjonslogikk. I tillegg gjøres det bruk av Archers Trestegs-modell som muliggjør en analyse av hvordan strukturelle og kulturelle egenskaper påvirker situasjonen til aktører. Avhandlinga undersøker dermed hvordan elevene refleksivt overveier egne handlinger i lys av strukturelle muligheter og begrensinger. Avhandlinga er basert på semistrukturerte intervju, utført på to tidspunkt, med atten elever i en rural og en urban kommune. I tillegg benyttes forskerens egne erfaringer og kontekstuelle kjennskap. Avhandlinga antyder at rurale elever er begrensa av rural demografi, det sentraliserte utdanningssystemet, koloniseringa av Sápmi, og en læreplan som tar mindre hensyn til rom/sted og etnisitet. Lokale mulighetsstrukturer gir, til en viss grad elever i distrikta handlingsrom. I tillegg benytter de seg av egne beslutnings egenskaper, noe som gjør dem til i stand til å navigere de eksisterende strukturene. Archers teori har i liten grad tatt for seg kontekstuelle betingelser; hvordan muligheter og begrensinger blir aktualisert i spesifikke strukturelle kontekster kan derfor videreutvikles. På et teoretisk plan befatter denne avhandlinga seg med kontekst ved å adressere strukturelle begrensinger og muligheter. Ettersom romlige egenskaper produserer ulike betingelser for utdanning, fremhever avhandlinga romlige/stedlige aspekter i Archers teoretiske rammeverk

The concept of engagement

In this paper, we illuminate the basic features of the concept of engagement, which has only become possible in the secular world, with the emergence of the modem individual deprived of any stable, eternal order or hierarchy of values. Still, engagement is not only individual but also collective, as the lack of certainty about the truth affects not only the community and society but also motivates them to follow the same paradigm as the individual - themselves at stake, without knowing where it could possibly lead, but with the intention to produce some tangible and stable sociocosmic structures that could alleviate man's uncertainty and thus insecurity. The necessity of engagement stems from the circumstance that man lives in a context saturated with meanings that call him out in advance and influence him. Therefore, engagement means actually acting back to the being-exposed to meanings and structures that have already affected man and his situation. One section of the text deals with an understanding of engagement in the contemporary, "postmodern" era