“I can do everything but see!” – How People with Vision Impairments Negotiate their Abilities in Social Contexts

This research takes an orientation to visual impairment (VI) that does not regard it as fixed or determined alone in or through the body. Instead, we consider (dis)ability as produced through interactions with the environment and configured by the people and technology within it. Specifically, we explore how abilities become negotiated through video ethnography with six VI athletes and spectators during the Rio 2016 Paralympics. We use generated in-depth examples to identify how technology can be a meaningful part of ability negotiations, emphasizing how these embed into the social interactions and lives of people with VI. In contrast to treating technology as a solution to a ‘sensory deficit’, we understand it to support the triangulation process of sense-making through provision of appropriate additional information. Further, we suggest that technology should not try and replace human assistance, but instead enable people with VI to better identify and interact with other people in-situ

Save the children’s shock advertising : how does it affect the audience’s feelings and perceptions?

Because non-profit agencies mostly rely on financial support from donors, they implemented creative ways to gain audience’s attention and thus donations. Shock advertising, as in the use of graphic and explicit images is a technique that has been used for a long time in the non-profit field. However, over time, the use of images such as starving and dying children, has started to draw criticism and has become a relevant theme in the public debate around representation. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse in depth the current advertising of Save the Children, an international leading non-profit organisation, and measure the impact of such advertising in terms of audience’s perceptions, attitudes and feelings. In order to conduct this study, a theoretical framing on post-colonial studies has been illustrated and a mixed methods approach has been implemented, specifically both a Critical Discourse Analysis and a survey has been employed. The findings are consistent in saying that recent advertising from Save the Children is able to promote a narrative based on the “Us versus Them” approach and that such approach when it comes to advertising is not favourable in terms of audience’s perceptions, specifically for what concerns general attitudes, feelings and perceptions but also for what concerns the willingness to donate and to engage with the organisation.Como as organizações sem fins lucrativos dependem principalmente do apoio financeiro de doadores, têm implementado maneiras criativas de atrair a atenção do público e, portanto, doações. A publicidade de choque, nomeadamente o uso de imagens gráficas e explícitas, é uma técnica que vem sendo utilizada há muito tempo no mundo das organizações sem fins lucrativos. No entanto, com o passar do tempo, o uso de imagens com crianças famintas e moribundas passou a receber críticas e tornou-se um tema relevante no debate público em torno da representação. 2 O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar em profundidade a publicidade atual da Save the Children, uma proeminente organização sem fins lucrativos de âmbito internacional, e medir o impacto dessa publicidade em termos das percepções, atitudes e sentimentos do público. Para realizar este estudo, estabeleceu-se um enquadramento teórico sobre os estudos pós-coloniais e implementou-se uma abordagem de métodos mistos, nomeadamente uma análise crítica do discurso e uma pesquisa. Os resultados mostram sistematicamente que a publicidade recente da Save the Children é capaz de promover uma narrativa baseada na abordagem “Nós versus Eles”, o que, quando se trata de publicidade, não é favorável em termos da percepção do público, especificamente no que respeita às atitudes, sentimentos e percepções gerais, mas também no que concerne à vontade de doar e de se envolver na organização

Agent Street: An Environment for Exploring Agent-Based Models in Second Life

Urban models can be seen on a continuum between iconic and symbolic. Generally speaking, iconic models are physical versions of the real world at some scaled down representation, while symbolic models represent the system in terms of the way they function replacing the physical or material system by some logical and/or mathematical formulae. Traditionally iconic and symbolic models were distinct classes of model but due to the rise of digital computing the distinction between the two is becoming blurred, with symbolic models being embedded into iconic models. However, such models tend to be single user. This paper demonstrates how 3D symbolic models in the form of agent-based simulations can be embedded into iconic models using the multi-user virtual world of Second Life. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates Second Life\'s potential for social science simulation. To demonstrate this, we first introduce Second Life and provide two exemplar models; Conway\'s Game of Life, and Schelling\'s Segregation Model which highlight how symbolic models can be viewed in an iconic environment. We then present a simple pedestrian evacuation model which merges the iconic and symbolic together and extends the model to directly incorporate avatars and agents in the same environment illustrating how \'real\' participants can influence simulation outcomes. Such examples demonstrate the potential for creating highly visual, immersive, interactive agent-based models for social scientists in multi-user real time virtual worlds. The paper concludes with some final comments on problems with representing models in current virtual worlds and future avenues of research.Agent-Based Modelling, Pedestrian Evacuation, Segregation, Virtual Worlds, Second Life

Provocative conservation/evocative design - contemporary design intervention in historic urban landscape

The notion of authenticity has been intensively debated in the field of heritage conservation. However, this slippery intellectual term is hardly instructive for urban conservation and design practice for historic environment in contemporary cities. The issues of authenticity leave us an unsolved gap in both conservation theory and methodology. How should we perceive the ‘authenticity’ of a place? How does a new design respect and reflect this notion? There is no single answer for these questions. Through this research, the idea of progressive authenticity has been gradually formed and explored. It argues that what is happening ‘now’ is more essential to authenticity. How should we respect ‘now’ in a landscape that the ‘past’ needed to be conserved? This is the ultimate question to the author as a designer. The research uses a series of design experiments to illustrate different ideas of authenticity, the conflict between different perspectives of understanding this notion and the view to open up various interpretations of authenticity. Meanwhile, this research explores how the meanings of a historic place could be presented and experienced differently from the conventional heritage interpretations. ‘Provocative’ and ‘Evocative’ are used as keywords for a range of designs, which encourage the users to understand, think about and interact with the historic site differently

Representations of the city in video games

This research strives to characterize the means by which video game players experience and understand the space of the game city during the course of play. Three-dimensional video game cities are neither static environments nor stationary views; rather, they are experienced through movement, action, and play. Our experiences of new places are not developed at a glance. Instead, they are cultivated through use over time. This work utilizes games that take place in constructed versions of New York City as a case study. By focusing on the ways players navigate spaces, we can understand how they construct spatial awareness and how this space is transformed into a meaningful place of play. In order to come to this understanding, this study asks a series of questions: How are these spaces arranged? How does the player move through the space and how does the game teach spatial navigation? What actions are performed in the space and how is gameplay adapted for the city environment? And how do of narrative environments contribute to a player's identification with the space? These questions are examined within a framework of urban, cultural, and game studies. I examine techniques that are employed by video game city designers to help players navigate space and make it meaningful. Additionally, this research poses areas for future expansion and experimentation with game cities.M.S.Committee Chair: Pearce, Celia; Committee Member: Do, Ellen Yi-Luen; Committee Member: Knoespel, Kenneth; Committee Member: Nitsche, Michae

Persistent Homology Guided Force-Directed Graph Layouts

Graphs are commonly used to encode relationships among entities, yet their abstractness makes them difficult to analyze. Node-link diagrams are popular for drawing graphs, and force-directed layouts provide a flexible method for node arrangements that use local relationships in an attempt to reveal the global shape of the graph. However, clutter and overlap of unrelated structures can lead to confusing graph visualizations. This paper leverages the persistent homology features of an undirected graph as derived information for interactive manipulation of force-directed layouts. We first discuss how to efficiently extract 0-dimensional persistent homology features from both weighted and unweighted undirected graphs. We then introduce the interactive persistence barcode used to manipulate the force-directed graph layout. In particular, the user adds and removes contracting and repulsing forces generated by the persistent homology features, eventually selecting the set of persistent homology features that most improve the layout. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our approach across a variety of synthetic and real datasets