How Design Plays Strategic Roles in Internet Service Innovation: Lessons from Korean Companies

In order to survive in the highly competitive internet business, companies have to provide differentiated services that can satisfy the rapidly changing users’ tastes and needs. Designers have been increasingly committed to achieving user satisfaction by generating and visualizing innovative solutions in new internet service development. The roles of internet service design have expanded from a narrow focus on aesthetics into a more strategic aspect. This paper investigates the methods of managing design in order to enhance companies’ competitiveness in internet business. The main research processes are to: (1) explore the current state of internet service design in Korea through in-depth interviews with professional designers and survey questionnaires to 30 digital design agencies and 60 clients; (2) compare how design is managed between in-house design groups and digital design agencies though the case studies of five Korean companies; and (3) develop a taxonomy characterizing four roles of designers in conjunction with the levels of their strategic contributions to internet service innovation: visualist, solution provider, concept generator, and service initiator. In addition, we demonstrate the growing contributions of the strategic use of design for innovating internet services, building robust brand equity, and increasing business performance. Keywords: Design Management; Internet Business; Internet Service Design; Digital Design; Digital Design Agency; In-House Design Group, Case Study</p

AlphaPilot: Autonomous Drone Racing

This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first autonomous drone racing world championship: the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge. Contrary to traditional drone racing systems, which only detect the next gate, our approach makes use of any visible gate and takes advantage of multiple, simultaneous gate detections to compensate for drift in the state estimate and build a global map of the gates. The global map and drift-compensated state estimate allow the drone to navigate through the race course even when the gates are not immediately visible and further enable to plan a near time-optimal path through the race course in real time based on approximate drone dynamics. The proposed system has been demonstrated to successfully guide the drone through tight race courses reaching speeds up to 8m/s and ranked second at the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.Comment: Accepted at Robotics: Science and Systems 2020, associated video at https://youtu.be/DGjwm5PZQT

An ideal model of an assistive technology assessment and delivery process

The purpose of the present work is to present some aspects of the Assistive Technology Assessment (ATA) process model compatible with the Position Paper 2012 by AAATE/EASTIN. Three aspects of the ATA process will be discussed in light of three topics of the Position Paper 2012: (i) The dimensions and the measures of the User eXperience (UX) evaluation modelled in the ATA process as a way to verify the efficient and the evidence-based practices of an AT service delivery centre; (ii) The relevance of the presence of the psychologist in the multidisciplinary team of an AT service delivery centre as necessary for a complete person-centred assistive solution empowering users to make their own choices; (iii) The new profession of the psychotechnologist, who explores users needs by seeking a proper assistive solution, leading the multidisciplinary team to observe critical issues and problems. Through the foundation of the Position Paper 2012, the 1995 HEART study, the Matching Person and Technology model, the ICF framework, and the pillars of the ATA process, this paper sets forth a concept and approach that emphasise the personal factors of the individual consumer and UX as key to positively impacting a successful outcome and AT solution

University-wide Internationalization of Curriculum: An Organizational Improvement Plan

In the past few decades, higher education institutions have witnessed a greater interest in the way international perspectives including political, social, cultural, economic and technological perspectives impact graduates’ global competency. The rationale behind this view is to develop a more relevant understanding in graduates of global cultures, global knowledges, and global problems so that they are better prepared for the world of work that awaits them outside the university campus, regionally or internationally. This OIP problematizes the lack of international perspectives in curriculum and proposes a university-wide solution to incorporate internationalization of curriculum. It draws from the theoretical concepts of culturally responsive pedagogy and international mindedness as foundational drivers of change and incorporates research and evidence-based models of internationalization of curriculum to the improvement plan. Both these foundations are significant as the former demands cross-cultural understanding and the latter demands the fulfillments of compelling pressures of globalization. An internationally minded strategic plan executed through strategic and transformational leadership approach using internationalization framework for curriculum forms the foundations of this OIP. The planning and development stage employ Cawsey et al. Change Path Model to plan and propel change forward and uses a PSDA model to monitor and evaluate change. The outcome is an internationally minded approach to curriculum flexible enough for different disciplines to adopt and execute, yet strategic enough to promote institution-wide change

DevOps is Bigger than IT: Driving Digital Transformation in Libraries

The DevOps movement represents a paradigm shift in software development, but there are misconceptions about what it really means. It’s much more nuanced than simply adding a DevOps engineer to your team or asking systems administrators and developers to play well together. At its core, DevOps is about culture change. In this talk, we will define the CALMS framework of DevOps and the people, technical, and organizational factors that challenge its adoption. We will share specific examples of how DevOps is changing the way we work on digital library projects at Ohio State University Libraries and how its universal principles can drive large-scale digital transformation in libraries. Presented at Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Spring 2020 Membership MeetingSlidesSpeaker notesNo embarg

StoryDroid: Automated Generation of Storyboard for Android Apps

Mobile apps are now ubiquitous. Before developing a new app, the development team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with similar purposes. The review process is crucial in the sense that it reduces market risks and provides inspiration for app development. However, manual exploration of hundreds of existing apps by different roles (e.g., product manager, UI/UX designer, developer) in a development team can be ineffective. For example, it is difficult to completely explore all the functionalities of the app in a short period of time. Inspired by the conception of storyboard in movie production, we propose a system, StoryDroid, to automatically generate the storyboard for Android apps, and assist different roles to review apps efficiently. Specifically, StoryDroid extracts the activity transition graph and leverages static analysis techniques to render UI pages to visualize the storyboard with the rendered pages. The mapping relations between UI pages and the corresponding implementation code (e.g., layout code, activity code, and method hierarchy) are also provided to users. Our comprehensive experiments unveil that StoryDroid is effective and indeed useful to assist app development. The outputs of StoryDroid enable several potential applications, such as the recommendation of UI design and layout code

Rationale in Development Chat Messages: An Exploratory Study

Chat messages of development teams play an increasingly significant role in software development, having replaced emails in some cases. Chat messages contain information about discussed issues, considered alternatives and argumentation leading to the decisions made during software development. These elements, defined as rationale, are invaluable during software evolution for documenting and reusing development knowledge. Rationale is also essential for coping with changes and for effective maintenance of the software system. However, exploiting the rationale hidden in the chat messages is challenging due to the high volume of unstructured messages covering a wide range of topics. This work presents the results of an exploratory study examining the frequency of rationale in chat messages, the completeness of the available rationale and the potential of automatic techniques for rationale extraction. For this purpose, we apply content analysis and machine learning techniques on more than 8,700 chat messages from three software development projects. Our results show that chat messages are a rich source of rationale and that machine learning is a promising technique for detecting rationale and identifying different rationale elements.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. The 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'17

Paradigm Shift: report on the new role of design in business and society

As leading businesses and global organizations started gaining new understanding of the value of design, their internal culture and attitude towards design began to change. Financial companies and management consultancies that have never before been associated with design are now creating their in-house design teams and including design in their portfolio of services. Large corporations that in the past used design in a limited capacity now rapidly increase their in-house design capabilities and appoint designers in executive roles. Venture capitalist firms and start-up companies also started recognizing the value that designers can bring to the business development stages of their investments. Even global organizations and international foundations started placing design on their agendas. All of this is causing a paradigm shift in the field of design. This study examines some of the latest corporate investments in design and reflects on what this means for the field of design. The focus of this study is on the key trend indicators that are defining the current landscape of design and its role in business and society

Suurten yritysten haasteet ja tukitoimet muotoiluajattelun soveltamisessa

Nowadays, traditional industries are being increasingly disrupted by innovative solutions that are being brought onto the market by startups. To deal with the pressure from new startup disruptions, large and established organizations need to activate their corporate innovation efforts, to more efficiently convert new ideas into value-creating solutions. For this, one potential solution is to implement ‘Design thinking’ into company processes. Design thinking is a human-centered method to innovation that seeks solutions to users’ exact needs and desires. No uniform definition for design thinking exists in current literature. For years, the literature focused on challenges that are solved with the method, instead of challenges in its implementation to existing and defined processes. This thesis addresses these gaps by first exploring the differences in perception of design thinking within one large organization, and then investigating the challenges faced and support actions experienced as beneficial in the implementation of design thinking. This thesis conducted a thematic analysis of nine semi-structured interviews with industrial and user experience designers in a Fortune 500 multinational technology corporation, with operations in around 100 countries. The interviewees represented three distinct organizational contexts pre-defined based on their position and impact in the organization: lone designer in the region, unit-embedded design teams and global-level design managers. The results echoed previous literature as there was no consensus found in the definition of design thinking among interviewees, and instead the method was seen as a continuous scale of practices. The higher position the interviewee possessed in the organization, the more design thinking activities they were able to recognize, the less challenges they faced and the more supportive actions they knew. The practices of design thinking are implemented most efficiently when introduced in the processes incrementally. The managers had a key role in the success of implementation, both directly and indirectly. However, further research with increased data is needed to prove reliability of conclusions.Tänä päivänä perinteiset teollisuuden toimialat joutuvat muuttamaan strategiaansa ja toimintaansa markkinoille tulevien uusien yritysten ja keksintöjen myötä. Suuret yritykset pystyvät paremmin vastaamaan kilpailijoidensa tuottamiin uusiin ratkaisuihin kehittämällä omia sisäisiä innovaatiokykyjä ja -prosesseja. Tavoitteena on saada ideat tehokkaasti muutettua arvoa tuottaviksi ratkaisuiksi. Yksi tapa kehittää yrityksen innovatiivisuutta on omaksua muotoiluajattelu (engl. design thinking) osaksi organisaation toimintaa. Muotoiluajattelu on käyttäjäkeskeinen menetelmä tai lähestymistapa, joka pyrkii löytämään uusia ja innovatiivisia ratkaisuja palvellakseen käyttäjien todellisia tarpeita ja haluja. Muotoiluajattelua ja sen sovelluksia ei ole määritelty kirjallisuudessa yksiselitteisesti. Tähän asti tutkimus on pääasiallisesti keskittynyt haasteiden osalta niihin haasteisiin, joita menetelmän avulla voidaan ratkoa, eikä niihin jotka ilmenevät menetelmän tuomisessa suurten yritysten prosesseihin ja yrityskulttuuriin. Toisaalta menetelmän omaksumista ja sen sovelluksia on aikaisemmin tutkittu pääasiassa muotoilutoimistojen näkökulmista eikä niinkään teknologiayritysten osalta. Tämä tutkimus pyrkii ymmärtämään, miten muotoiluajattelu koetaan eri puolilla isoa teknologiaorganisaatiota, mitä haasteita tulee vastaan sen omaksumisessa sekä millä tukitoiminnoilla niistä voisi selviytyä. Tutkimus toteutettiin teema-analyysina yhdeksän semi-strukturoidun haastattelun pohjalta. Haastateltavina toimivat teolliset-ja käyttäjäkokemusmuotoilijat kansainvälisestä Fortune 500 -listatusta teknologiayrityksestä. Haastateltavat edustivat kolmea eri organisaatiokontekstia: alueen ainoita muotoilijoita, yksikön sisällä toimivia muotoilutiimejä sekä globaalien muotoilutiimien vetäjiä. Vaikka lisätutkimuksia tarvitaan vielä suuremmalla tutkimusotannalla, jo tämän työn tulokset heijastavat aikaisempaa kirjallisuutta muotoiluajattelun termin monista eri tulkinnoista ja merkityksistä. Haastateltavien erilaisten määritelmien pohjalta voidaan todeta, että menetelmä voidaan nähdä käytäntömuotojen jatkuvana prosessina. Toisaalta mitä korkeammassa asemassa haastateltava työskenteli, sitä tutumpi menetelmä oli ja sitä vähemmän haasteita he raportoivat kohtaavansa. Nämä muotoilijat käyttivät myös enemmän tukitoimia hyödykseen. Esimiehet olivat suorasti ja epäsuorasti keskeisessä asemassa muutoksen onnistumisessa jokaisessa organisaatiokontekstissa. Tehokkaimpana tapana omaksua muotoiluajattelu osaksi oman organisaation prosesseja koettiin uusien käytäntöjen asteittainen levittäminen yritykseen