The strategic value of ergonomics for companies

The discipline of ergonomics studies the interaction between man and the designed technical and organizational environment. In product ergonomics, this knowledge is used to develop user-friendly products and in production ergonomics to design human-friendly (production) processes. Beside social goals, ergonomics can contribute to economic goals of an organization. With user-friendly products, a company can deliver benefits to its customers, which exceed those of competing products. With human-friendly production processes, a company can increase labor productivity and consequently can reach important cost-reductions. The growing consciousness of the importance of humans (customers and workers) for the success of organizations, implies that ergonomics can have a strategic value for the management of organizations. In this paper a model is presented how ergonomics can be integrated in the decision-making and design processes of organizations, and examples are given to show possible business benefits.Competitive advantage, labor productivity, human centered design, product development, process development

Improving Data-Driven Decision Making through Human-Centered Knowledge Sharing

This research focuses on human-centered knowledge sharing within data-driven decision-making processes enabled by advanced analytics. The paper describes an exploratory study of an innovative approach to ongoing improvement of complex data-driven decision making processes found in a large retail distribution company by considering a complex interplay of business intelligence (BI) /business analytics, business processes and human-centered knowledge management. Using the relevant IS frameworks as analytical lens the paper investigates the evolving relationship between decision-making and decision-support technology, as well as the relationship among information, decisions and the corresponding business processes in this context. The most important finding of this research is in identification of human-centered knowledge sharing as the key success factor for ongoing improvement of BI-enabled decision making in the case organisation, rather than complex technology. This in turn indicates the significance of various organisational factors, including carefully designed and implemented human-resource (HR) strategies to encourage knowledge sharing among decision makers using advanced analytics systems. Finally, this paper also confirms the latest industry reports that more mature analytical organisations are looking beyond technology and focusing on business-related issues as the next source of competitive advantage, as it was the case with our chosen organisation

You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems

Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE VAST 2019, to be held October 20-25 in Vancouver, Canada. Paper will also be published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing, Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation method

THE DAY “GOD” FAILED OR OVERTRUST IN AUTOMATION. A PORTUGUESE CASE STUDY

The increasing development of computer based technologies open new horizons in task automation, helping pilots and air traffic controllers to carry out the analysis and resolution of an increasing number of cognitive tasks, in complex working environments. However, there is a general agreement that cognitive automation may lead to overtrust, complacency and loss of the necessary operational situation feed back, as the basis of the mental model refreshment which, in turn, allows for the maintenance of coherent situation awareness of all the operational processes. The case study reported suggests there is a dimension to be followed in human machine integration, which is beyond the technological deterministic approach of human machine interface design, and calls for a better human comprehension of system nature. The human comprehension of this dimension, which we introduce as the technological factor, represents the basis of systemic self-constructed situation awareness, in a real human centered development.automation; situation awareness; mental model; overtrust in automation

A User-Centered Concept Mining System for Query and Document Understanding at Tencent

Concepts embody the knowledge of the world and facilitate the cognitive processes of human beings. Mining concepts from web documents and constructing the corresponding taxonomy are core research problems in text understanding and support many downstream tasks such as query analysis, knowledge base construction, recommendation, and search. However, we argue that most prior studies extract formal and overly general concepts from Wikipedia or static web pages, which are not representing the user perspective. In this paper, we describe our experience of implementing and deploying ConcepT in Tencent QQ Browser. It discovers user-centered concepts at the right granularity conforming to user interests, by mining a large amount of user queries and interactive search click logs. The extracted concepts have the proper granularity, are consistent with user language styles and are dynamically updated. We further present our techniques to tag documents with user-centered concepts and to construct a topic-concept-instance taxonomy, which has helped to improve search as well as news feeds recommendation in Tencent QQ Browser. We performed extensive offline evaluation to demonstrate that our approach could extract concepts of higher quality compared to several other existing methods. Our system has been deployed in Tencent QQ Browser. Results from online A/B testing involving a large number of real users suggest that the Impression Efficiency of feeds users increased by 6.01% after incorporating the user-centered concepts into the recommendation framework of Tencent QQ Browser.Comment: Accepted by KDD 201

Considering the User in the Wireless World

The near future promises significant advances in communication capabilities, but one of the keys to success is the capability understanding of the people with regards to its value and usage. In considering the role of the user in the wireless world of the future, the Human Perspective Working Group (WG1) of the Wireless World Research Forum has gathered input and developed positions in four important areas: methods, processes, and best practices for user-centered research and design; reference frameworks for modeling user needs within the context of wireless systems; user scenario creation and analysis; and user interaction technologies. This article provides an overview of WG1's work in these areas that are critical to ensuring that the future wireless world meets and exceeds the expectations of people in the coming decades

Sculptural Thinking in Fashion

Human thinking in relation to the body is conditioned by an understanding of the body as a three-dimensional form. The fashion designer Madame Gres said ‘I wanted to be a sculptor — for me it is just the same to work with fabric or stone.’ Sculpture and fashion both adopt figurative formations, a default position of representing human form in space, motion and time: both an art form receptive to the senses of sight, touch and gravitational pull. This research questions whether the thinking processes in fashion design are common with thinking in sculptural practices within fine art. The question emerged through conversations between a fashion designer and a contemporary artist and centered upon the use of language, thinking and reflective practices, and the articulation and application of material processes. To address these questions we focused upon two approaches: whether thought and its articulation in the lexicon of creative practice is common and whether there is a two way flow of visual, material and technical influences. The initial conversation centered upon the art historian, Rowan Bailey’s essay ‘Herder’s Sculptural Thinking.’ Our interpretations of this work identified that thought itself evolves in the experience of three-dimensions and sharing our experiences of touch. The idea of the sculptural therefore becomes social; a shared phenomena. We became interested in how thinking begins to take shape in material forms, or the notion of working creatively in three-dimensionality is in itself a structure of the emotions that connect to a line of thought. The first section of the paper establishes a platform for the second section by investigating the significance of touch and mimicry, and the philosophies behind thinking sculpturally. The second section considers the effects of influence between the two disciplines, noting an interaction between the creative processes in sculpture and fashion design, such as: modeling, draping, molding, stacking, casting, shaping and carving. The paper concludes by drawing together the two sections