Interaction design & Usability from an Indian perspective - Talks with: Apala Chavan, Anirudha Joshi, Dinesh Katre, Devashish Pandya, Sammeer Chabukswar, Pradeep Yammiyavar

This is a collection of talks on usability and culture with prominent researchers and practitioners on the Indian interaction design and usability scene: Apala Chavan, Anirudha Joshi, Dinesh Katre, Devashish Pandya, Sammeer Chabukswar, and Pradeep Yammiyavar. I did these talks because for several years I have been the coordinator of a cross cultural research project in India, China and Denmark that aims at investigating the impact of culture on the results of established methods of usability testing. During these years I gradually have come to realize the need for letting the prominent researchers and practitioners in the Indian software industry and university world speak about the big questions in the field. Without this grand context, it is in fact impossible to understand what research experiments will tell us about interaction design and usability in India and abroad. Therefore I first give an introduction to cultural usability and then present the six talks

Online Surveys in Collecting Cross-Cultural Qualitative User Experience Feedback

Globalisation of markets means that many interactive technology products and services need to be usable and provide a positive User Experience (UX) to people in various target market areas. Simultaneously, over the last decade, positive UX has become an important quality attribute and a business-critical asset in the design of interactive technology products and services. Different countries have different cultural values, which direct the way in which people interpret and use technology products and services. Therefore, to ensure that products and services are easy to use and that they provide a positive UX across cultural boundaries, there is a need to understand how local cultures may affect the use of and interaction with technology. Cultural issues affect not only the UX of technology products and services but also the UX research methods. Culture itself is a complex concept affecting a vast area of human life and interaction. Consequently, designers are facing challenges in creating a delightful UX for an increasing number of users from different cultural backgrounds.In this thesis work, we aim to produce original contributions by investigating and developing better online survey tools and insights about their applicability in cross-cultural remote online UX research. Remote online methods are needed in increasing cross-cultural UX research, and they are considered practical, and may have extensive and wide scale samples suited to cross-cultural UX research. In particular, we aim to understand how an online survey fits into a cross-cultural UX research in terms of collecting qualitative feedback. As the goal is to understand online UX surveys and users in different local cultures it is our aim to gain knowledge about what kind of cultural issues affect these surveys and how they should be taken into consideration in human-centred design (HCD). We focus on studying how qualitative material such as textual and visual materials can be used in cross-cultural online UX surveys. We reflect on the practical implications of the results in a theoretical concept of cross-cultural online UX survey process. Our research has a multiple-case research design strategy and most of our case studies were executed in a real product development context with an emphasis on the qualitative research.We found that online surveys with sentence completion, diaries and storyboards are well suited to crosscultural UX research in collecting qualitative feedback. The central cross-cultural issues having implications for cross-cultural, qualitative online UX surveys concerned textual and visual materials. With regards to the textual material in collecting cross-cultural, qualitative UX feedback, we found that there are cultural differences in how respondents understand, interpret and share their experiences in an online UX survey. For example, culture has an effect on language and communication style, which in turn have an effect on the answers. Furthermore, we found that the use of the sentence completion method in an online UX survey is relatively fast and easy way to collect a large amount of cross-cultural, qualitative UX feedback regarding the different UX dimensions for product development purposes. The use of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions in the data analysis gives a better understanding of the impact of specific cultures on the results.Concerning the visual material, we found that storyboards assisted respondents in providing rich answers to a long survey because of a sound understanding of the intended situations, and ease of imagining themselves in different usage scenarios. The use of internationalised and localised storyboards allowed us to collect UX feedback, even though respondents had never used or seen the intended product. They were able to give feedback and ideas for design in the early phase of product development in requirement gathering. Using culture as a resource for design involving local users in the design process supports HCD principles. We presented the main phases in a theoretical concept of cross-cultural online UX survey process to help designers include cultural issues in the design of a cross-cultural online UX survey

An aesthetic for sustainable interactions in product-service systems?

Copyright @ 2012 Greenleaf PublishingEco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability. However the application of this concept is still very limited because its implementation and diffusion is hindered by several barriers (cultural, corporate and regulative ones). The paper investigates the barriers that affect the attractiveness and acceptation of eco-efficient PSS alternatives, and opens the debate on the aesthetic of eco-efficient PSS, and the way in which aesthetic could enhance some specific inner qualities of this kinds of innovations. Integrating insights from semiotics, the paper outlines some first research hypothesis on how the aesthetic elements of an eco-efficient PSS could facilitate user attraction, acceptation and satisfaction

ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

CURATION AND MANAGEMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE THROUGH LIBRARIES

Libraries, museums and archives hold valuable collections in a variety of media, presenting a vast body of knowledge rooted in the history of human civilisation. These form the repository of the wisdom of great works by thinkers of past and the present. The holdings of these institutions are priceless heritage of the mankind as they preserve documents, ideas, and the oral and written records. To value the cultural heritage and to care for it as a treasure bequeathed to us by our ancestors is the major responsibility of libraries. The past records constitute a natural resource and are indispensable to the present generation as well as to the generations to come. Libraries preserve the documentary heritage resources for which they are primarily responsible. Any loss of such materials is simply irreplaceable. Therefore, preserving this intellectual, cultural heritage becomes not only the academic commitment but also the moral responsibility of the librarians/information scientists, who are in charge of these repositories. The high quality of the papers and the discussion represent the thinking and experience of experts in their particular fields. The contributed papers also relate to the methodology used in libraries in Asia to provide access to manuscripts and cultural heritage. The volume discusses best practices in Knowledge preservation and how to collaborate and preserve the culture. The book also deals with manuscript and archives issues in the digital era. The approach of this book is concise, comprehensively, covering all major aspects of preservation and conservation through libraries. The readership of the book is not just limited to library and information science professionals, but also for those involved in conservation, preservation, restoration or other related disciplines. The book will be useful for librarians, archivists and conservators. We thank the Sunan Kalijaga University, Special Libraries Association- Asian Chapter for their trust and their constant support, all the contributors for their submissions, the members of the Local and International Committee for their reviewing effort for making this publication possible

The drivers of Corporate Social Responsibility in the supply chain. A case study.

Purpose: The paper studies the way in which a SME integrates CSR into its corporate strategy, the practices it puts in place and how its CSR strategies reflect on its suppliers and customers relations. Methodology/Research limitations: A qualitative case study methodology is used. The use of a single case study limits the generalizing capacity of these findings. Findings: The entrepreneur’s ethical beliefs and value system play a fundamental role in shaping sustainable corporate strategy. Furthermore, the type of competitive strategy selected based on innovation, quality and responsibility clearly emerges both in terms of well defined management procedures and supply chain relations as a whole aimed at involving partners in the process of sustainable innovation. Originality/value: The paper presents a SME that has devised an original innovative business model. The study pivots on the issues of innovation and eco-sustainability in a context of drivers for CRS and business ethics. These values are considered fundamental at International level; the United Nations has declared 2011 the “International Year of Forestry”

2018 FSDG Combined Abstracts

https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg_abstracts/1000/thumbnail.jp

Introduction to Development Engineering

This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering and its constituent theories, methods, and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design and scaling of technologies for low-resource communities. The scope is broad, ranging from the development of mobile applications for low-literacy users to hardware and software solutions for providing electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences. The opening section reviews the history of “technology-for-development” research, and presents a framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book’s iterative approach of “innovation, implementation, evaluation, adaptation.” Each of the next six thematic sections focuses on a different sector: energy and environment; market performance; education and labor; water, sanitation and health; digital governance; and connectivity. These thematic sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study describes the design, evaluation, and/or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a single form, with common elements and discussion questions, to create continuity and pedagogical consistency. Together, they highlight successful solutions to development challenges, while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies, highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists will face in designing technology interventions that sustainably accelerate economic development. Development Engineering provides, for the first time, a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of poverty and global climate change through the design of better technologies. It offers the rigorous discipline needed to channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and engineers toward advancing social justice and improved living conditions in low-resource communities around the world