Improving the Usability of Interactive Systems by Incorporating Design Thinking into the Engineering Process: Raising Computer Science Students’ Awareness of Quality versus Quantity in Ideation

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Exploring Russian Tap-Code Text Entry Adaptions for Users with Reduced Target Hitting Accuracy

Text is still the dominant form of human-computer-human communication. Users with certain motor or visual impairments may be unable to use certain text entry interfaces such as the small virtual keyboards on mobile phones effectively due to challenges hitting small targets. Despite the vast amount of research into text entry, no efforts have explored the so-called Russian tap-codes, or knock codes, which were commonly used to communicate between prison inmates. Tapping does not require the user to hit a specific target. This study proposes a theoretical framework for classifying text entry designs. The framework is used to explore 16 text entry designs, namely the classic Russian tap code and design variations exploiting more recent results in text entry research and the context of current hardware, allowing unfeasible designs to be easily eliminated

Sustainable Mobility and Transport

This Special Issue is dedicated to sustainable mobility and transport, with a special focus on technological advancements. Global transport systems are significant sources of air, land, and water emissions. A key motivator for this Special Issue was the diversity and complexity of mitigating transport emissions and industry adaptions towards increasingly stricter regulation. Originally, the Special Issue called for papers devoted to all forms of mobility and transports. The papers published in this Special Issue cover a wide range of topics, aiming to increase understanding of the impacts and effects of mobility and transport in working towards sustainability, where most studies place technological innovations at the heart of the matter. The goal of the Special Issue is to present research that focuses, on the one hand, on the challenges and obstacles on a system-level decision making of clean mobility, and on the other, on indirect effects caused by these changes

Sensors Application in Agriculture

Novel technologies are playing an important role in the development of crop and livestock farming and have the potential to be the key drivers of sustainable intensification of agricultural systems. In particular, new sensors are now available with reduced dimensions, reduced costs, and increased performances, which can be implemented and integrated in production systems, providing more data and eventually an increase in information. It is of great importance to support the digital transformation, precision agriculture, and smart farming, and to eventually allow a revolution in the way food is produced. In order to exploit these results, authoritative studies from the research world are still needed to support the development and implementation of new solutions and best practices. This Special Issue is aimed at bringing together recent developments related to novel sensors and their proved or potential applications in agriculture

Mapping the British biopic: Evolution, conventions, reception and masculinities

This thesis offers a revaluation of the British biopic, which has often been subsumed into the broader ‘historical film’ category, identifying a critical neglect despite its successful presence throughout the history of the British film industry. It argues that the biopic is a necessary category because producers, reviewers and cinemagoers have significant investments in biographical subjects, and because biopics construct a ‘public history’ for a broad audience. This thesis provides a timeline of British biopics released from 1900 to 2014, constructing an historical overview of the continuities and shifts the genre has undergone. It also constructs an assessment of the representation of masculinity in the biopic, including detailed textual readings of representations of masculinity in biopics released between 2005 and 2014. This rectifies the critical neglect of masculinity in the biopic, despite the majority of biopics being about men.Following a critique of existing critical approaches to the biopic, including the viability of applying American paradigms to the biopic as a whole, subsequent chapters analyse the major aspects of the British biopic: a history of the production and reception of biopics and a survey of the biopic’s conventions. An inter-chapter introduces the nature of representations of masculinity in the British biopic using specific paradigmatic examples and the final two chapters focus on a detailed analysis of the representation of masculinity in particular films from the contemporary period which are mapped onto contemporaneous understandings of masculinity. One chapter considers the diversity of homosocial representations and those depicting ‘wounded’ men; the other discusses the ways in which selected films depict wounded men rehabilitated through supportive homosocial bonds.The thesis makes a contribution to knowledge in three ways: 1) an understanding and analysis of the biopic, a genre that has attracted few studies; 2) an historical overview of the British biopic which has not yet been attempted; 3) a detailed analysis of the representation of masculinity in the British biopic which, the thesis argues, is a distinctive and largely neglected aspect. The thesis argues that the British biopic has specifically national characteristics and that these patterns offer evidence of a profound difference between British and American paradigms

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

A Decision Support System for Economic Viability and Environmental Impact Assessment of Vertical Farms

Vertical farming (VF) is the practice of growing crops or animals using the vertical dimension via multi-tier racks or vertically inclined surfaces. In this thesis, I focus on the emerging industry of plant-specific VF. Vertical plant farming (VPF) is a promising and relatively novel practice that can be conducted in buildings with environmental control and artificial lighting. However, the nascent sector has experienced challenges in economic viability, standardisation, and environmental sustainability. Practitioners and academics call for a comprehensive financial analysis of VPF, but efforts are stifled by a lack of valid and available data. A review of economic estimation and horticultural software identifies a need for a decision support system (DSS) that facilitates risk-empowered business planning for vertical farmers. This thesis proposes an open-source DSS framework to evaluate business sustainability through financial risk and environmental impact assessments. Data from the literature, alongside lessons learned from industry practitioners, would be centralised in the proposed DSS using imprecise data techniques. These techniques have been applied in engineering but are seldom used in financial forecasting. This could benefit complex sectors which only have scarce data to predict business viability. To begin the execution of the DSS framework, VPF practitioners were interviewed using a mixed-methods approach. Learnings from over 19 shuttered and operational VPF projects provide insights into the barriers inhibiting scalability and identifying risks to form a risk taxonomy. Labour was the most commonly reported top challenge. Therefore, research was conducted to explore lean principles to improve productivity. A probabilistic model representing a spectrum of variables and their associated uncertainty was built according to the DSS framework to evaluate the financial risk for VF projects. This enabled flexible computation without precise production or financial data to improve economic estimation accuracy. The model assessed two VPF cases (one in the UK and another in Japan), demonstrating the first risk and uncertainty quantification of VPF business models in the literature. The results highlighted measures to improve economic viability and the viability of the UK and Japan case. The environmental impact assessment model was developed, allowing VPF operators to evaluate their carbon footprint compared to traditional agriculture using life-cycle assessment. I explore strategies for net-zero carbon production through sensitivity analysis. Renewable energies, especially solar, geothermal, and tidal power, show promise for reducing the carbon emissions of indoor VPF. Results show that renewably-powered VPF can reduce carbon emissions compared to field-based agriculture when considering the land-use change. The drivers for DSS adoption have been researched, showing a pathway of compliance and design thinking to overcome the ‘problem of implementation’ and enable commercialisation. Further work is suggested to standardise VF equipment, collect benchmarking data, and characterise risks. This work will reduce risk and uncertainty and accelerate the sector’s emergence

Eye quietness and quiet eye in expert and novice golf performance: an electrooculographic analysis

Quiet eye (QE) is the final ocular fixation on the target of an action (e.g., the ball in golf putting). Camerabased eye-tracking studies have consistently found longer QE durations in experts than novices; however, mechanisms underlying QE are not known. To offer a new perspective we examined the feasibility of measuring the QE using electrooculography (EOG) and developed an index to assess ocular activity across time: eye quietness (EQ). Ten expert and ten novice golfers putted 60 balls to a 2.4 m distant hole. Horizontal EOG (2ms resolution) was recorded from two electrodes placed on the outer sides of the eyes. QE duration was measured using a EOG voltage threshold and comprised the sum of the pre-movement and post-movement initiation components. EQ was computed as the standard deviation of the EOG in 0.5 s bins from –4 to +2 s, relative to backswing initiation: lower values indicate less movement of the eyes, hence greater quietness. Finally, we measured club-ball address and swing durations. T-tests showed that total QE did not differ between groups (p = .31); however, experts had marginally shorter pre-movement QE (p = .08) and longer post-movement QE (p < .001) than novices. A group × time ANOVA revealed that experts had less EQ before backswing initiation and greater EQ after backswing initiation (p = .002). QE durations were inversely correlated with EQ from –1.5 to 1 s (rs = –.48 - –.90, ps = .03 - .001). Experts had longer swing durations than novices (p = .01) and, importantly, swing durations correlated positively with post-movement QE (r = .52, p = .02) and negatively with EQ from 0.5 to 1s (r = –.63, p = .003). This study demonstrates the feasibility of measuring ocular activity using EOG and validates EQ as an index of ocular activity. Its findings challenge the dominant perspective on QE and provide new evidence that expert-novice differences in ocular activity may reflect differences in the kinematics of how experts and novices execute skills

Ctrl Shift: How Crip Alt Ctrl Designers Change the Game and Reimagine Access

My journey as a disabled arts practitioner has been one of invention, hacking, and re-imagining what input systems could be. I have created my own modalities for creating work, rather than relying on commercially available options. This is a common practice within the disabled community, as individuals often modify and hack their surroundings to make them more usable. For example, ADAPT activists took sledgehammers to smash curb cuts and poured curb ramps with cement bags, ultimately leading to the widespread adoption of curb cuts as a standard architectural feature. As Yergeau notes, this type of "criptastic hacking" represents a creative resistance.(Yergeau, 2012) My interfaces and art projects are a combination of science fiction world-building, technology prototyping, and experimentation with novel ways of experiencing the world that work for my ability. I have been building interactive objects for over 20 years, and my bespoke controller games are both pieces I find comfortable to play and conceptual proposals that I share with the games community to spark consideration for alternative ways of interacting with games culture. This interdisciplinary design research herein crosses a range of disciplines, drawing inspiration from radical forms of cognitive science, games studies, feminist studies, HCI, crip technoscience, radical science fiction, disability studies, and making practices. What has emerged through studying my own practice and the practices of others during this research is a criptastic design framework for creating playful experiences. My research aims to gain a deeper understanding of the ways that hacking and remaking the world manifests as modifications to the design process itself. I created four versions of a physical alt ctrl game and conducted a design study with disabled artists and alt ctrl game creators. The game, Bot Party, was developed through a series of public exhibitions and explored my relationship between criptastic bespoke interface design and embodied experiences of group play. Bot Party involves physical interaction among players in groups to understand my own ways of designing, while the study looks three other disabled designers to understand the ways in which their process is similar or different to my own. By conducting this work, I aim to contribute to the larger conversation within the games studies community about the importance of accessibility and inclusivity in game design. The results highlight the need for continued exploration and development in this area, specifically in design methods. The study’s findings as they relate to my own practice revealed the importance of considering a set of values and design processes in relation to disability when creating games and playful experiences. With this perspective, I propose an initial framework that outlines possible key themes for disabled game designers. Using values as a starting point for creating deeply accessible games, this framework serves as a starting point for future research into accessible game design. This framework seeks to subvert the notion that accessibility is a list of UX best practices, audio descriptions, captions, and haptic additions and moves towards embedding within game design the values and practices used by disabled designers from the outset of the creative process. Access can be a creative framework. An important point to make is that my efforts to do a PhD resist the academic ableism limiting the participation of people who are not from a normative background. The act of creating this PhD has eaten at the edge of my ability, and the research here was often conducted in pain under extremely trying circumstances. This perspective is relevant because it often informed my design choices and thinking. Additionally, it was conducted at a university where I experienced active discrimination from members of staff who simply refused to believe in disabilities they could not see, and in one case writing down my disability was, “self-ascribed.” To work, I had to move outside the academy and seek out workshops which gave me accessible, ergonomic equipment as is discussed in the Bot Party section. This bears mentioning because it reflects on how threatening disabilities can be within academic settings and how even providing basic levels of accessibility remains a challenge for academic institutions. The above framework could benefit academia if used to redesign postgraduate academic research practices within the academy from a place of Crip-informed pedagogy. This is future work that this academic researcher hopes to explore in depth within their academic journey. It is important to note, much of the most relevant research to this thesis around disability studies and technology has emerged in recent years and as a result, was included iteratively in the literature review. It has informed the third study and my iterative design practice as part of the journey; however, I began this work before much of the writing in the literature review existed, including the creation of Bot Party’s first iterations. Finding this scholarship and these authors has been a kinning. Kinship, according to Gavin Van Horn, “can be considered a noun…shared and storied relations and memories that inhere in people and places; or more metaphorical imaginings that unite us to faith traditions, cultures, countries, or the planet…Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning.” (Horn et al., 2021) Kinning happened throughout this work and this thesis served me as a place for discovery, contemplation, and empowerment. It is my hope sections of it will serve this function for others within my community. I found kinship with other authors working in the field of disability studies and technology, particularly with Alison Kafer, who offers a critique of Donna Haraway's cyborg in her book "Feminist Queer Crip." (Kafer, 2013) Kafer's work highlights the limitations of Haraway's cyborg as a figure of empowerment for marginalized bodies and identities, and instead advocates for a crip-queer-feminist perspective on technology and embodiment. Additionally, the author has also found resonance in the work of Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsh, whose work in disability studies and HCI has been instrumental in shaping this research. Specifically, their concept of "crip technoscience" has been a key framework for understanding technology creation by disabled technologists. (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019) Overall, it is my hope that this thesis will serve as a generative resource for others within the community on this journey, particularly for those who are working towards a more inclusive and intersectional understanding of technology and embodiment

TIME, SPACE, AND IDENTITY IN POPE MEMES: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS

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