Discovery Is Never By Chance: Designing for (Un)Serendipity

Serendipity has a long tradition in the history of science as having played a key role in many significant discoveries. Computer scientists, valuing the role of serendipity in discovery, have attempted to design systems that encourage serendipity. However, that research has focused primarily on only one aspect of serendipity: that of chance encounters. In reality, for serendipity to be valuable chance encounters must be synthesized into insight. In this paper we show, through a formal consideration of serendipity and analysis of how various systems have seized on attributes of interpreting serendipity, that there is a richer space for design to support serendipitous creativity, innovation and discovery than has been tapped to date. We discuss how ideas might be encoded to be shared or discovered by ‘association-hunting’ agents. We propose considering not only the inventor’s role in perceiving serendipity, but also how that inventor’s perception may be enhanced to increase the opportunity for serendipity. We explore the role of environment and how we can better enable serendipitous discoveries to find a home more readily and immediately

The emergent roles of a designer in the development of an e learning service

This paper presents reflections from a service design case study and uses it to investigate the emerging roles of a designer. Skills, methodologies and values are drawn through the case study and used to communicate how this contributes to the continuing expansion of the profession today. Seven roles are discussed in this paper: designer as a facilitator, communicator, capability builder, strategist, researcher, entrepreneur and co-creator. The analysis of the activities of the designer in this particular case study has indicated a presence of all of these roles in various degrees. This brings up three key questions for discussion: 1. How can the design profession communicate the value of this role shift to external audiences? 2. How will design education address the requirements of these emerging roles? and more relevant to this workshop, 3. How will businesses utilise these additional skills of a designer

Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis's model to design.

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources.However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis’s - by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours

An Integrative Design Methodology to Support an Inter-Organizational Knowledge Management Solution

Design research develops knowledge to respond to real-world challenges and solve authentic problems. In this paper, we adopt a pragmatic and semantic design approach to combine the best of two separate design discourses: the discourse about developing science-based design rules and the discourse on user-centered, participative, and experience-based design. We develop a methodology that combines both discourses and perspectives. Subsequently, this methodology is illustrated by means of a case study of designing and developing a portal for mapping competencies in the multi-stakeholder environment of an IT cluster. This case study suggests design research can become more effective if it adopts a deliberate focus on articulating design rules as well as engaging users in trying out prototypes, to create artifacts that support and drive the dialogue between user-practitioners and design-oriented researchers

WonderFlow: Narration-Centric Design of Animated Data Videos

Creating an animated data video enriched with audio narration takes a significant amount of time and effort and requires expertise. Users not only need to design complex animations, but also turn written text scripts into audio narrations and synchronize visual changes with the narrations. This paper presents WonderFlow, an interactive authoring tool, that facilitates narration-centric design of animated data videos. WonderFlow allows authors to easily specify a semantic link between text and the corresponding chart elements. Then it automatically generates audio narration by leveraging text-to-speech techniques and aligns the narration with an animation. WonderFlow provides a visualization structure-aware animation library designed to ease chart animation creation, enabling authors to apply pre-designed animation effects to common visualization components. It also allows authors to preview and iteratively refine their data videos in a unified system, without having to switch between different creation tools. To evaluate WonderFlow's effectiveness and usability, we created an example gallery and conducted a user study and expert interviews. The results demonstrated that WonderFlow is easy to use and simplifies the creation of data videos with narration-animation interplay

Bluetooth Tracking Approach For User Assistance Based In Sequential Patterns Analysis.

As a civilization, we are drowning in a raging torrent of data, of our own making, that is being harvested by our collective technologies and systems (e.g. Fitbit, phones). However, data itself is of no utility unless it is converted into beneficial knowledge. Design patterns have been shown to be a pragmatic solution to control and manage information flows and provide order and mean-ing to data within a given context. Assisting users within their daily activities has become a key aspect for modern Artificial Intelligence Systems. Neverthe-less, although the GPS technologies work well for outside location, indoor posi-tioning is still problematic, while is a vital awareness component in ambient as-sistance. This paper shows a preliminary Bluetooth tracking system with a focus on the user’s transition between areas of interest. Our work aims to shed light on how the term design patterns can be applied for studying human behavior patterns in the smart environment