SUPPORTING THERAPY-CENTERED GAME DESIGN FOR BRAIN INJURY REHABILITATION

Brain injuries (BI) are a major public health issue. Many therapists who work with patients who have had a BI include games to ameliorate boredom associated with repetitive rehabilitation. However, designing effective, appropriate, and engaging games for BI therapy is challenging. The challenge is especially manifested when considering how to consolidate the different mindsets and motivations among key stakeholders; i.e., game designers and therapists. In this dissertation, I investigated the ideation, creation, and evaluation of game design patterns and a design tool, GaPBIT (Game Design Patterns for BI Therapy) that leveraged patterns to support ideation of BI therapy game concepts and facilitate communication among designers and therapists. Design patterns, originated from the work of Christopher Alexander, provide a common design language in a specific field by documenting reusable design concepts that have successfully solved recurring problems. This investigation involved four overlapping phases. In Phase One, I interviewed 11 professional game designers focused on games for health (serious games embedded with health-related goals) to explore how they perceived and approached their work. In Phase Two, I identified 25 therapy-centered game design patterns through analyzing data about game use in BI therapy. Based on those patterns, in Phase Three I created and iterated the GaPBIT prototype through user studies. In Phase Four, I conducted quasi-experimental case studies to establish the efficacy and user experience of GaPBIT in game design workshops that involved both game designers and therapists. During the design workshops, the design patterns and GaPBIT supported exploration of game design ideas and effectively facilitated discussion among designers and therapists. The results also indicated that these tools were especially beneficial for novice game designers. This work significantly promotes game design for BI rehabilitation by providing designers and therapists with easier access to the information about requirements in rehabilitation games. Additionally, this work modeled a novel research methodology for investigating domains where balancing the role of designers and other stakeholders is particularly important. Through a “practitioner-centered” process, this work also provides an exemplar of investigating technologies that directly address the information needs of professional practitioners

Annual Report 2017-2018

LETTER FROM THE DEAN I am pleased to share with you the College of Computing and Digital Media’s (CDM) 2017-18 annual report, highlighting the many achievements across our community. It was a big year. We began offering five new programs (two bachelor’s, two master’s, and one PhD) across our three schools, in addition to several new certificate programs through our Institute for Professional Development. We built new, cutting-edge spaces to support these and other programs— most notably a 4,500 square-foot makerspace, a robotics and medical engineering lab, an augmented and virtual reality lab, and plans for a cyber-physical systems project lab. Our faculty continued to pursue their research and creative agendas, offering collaborative opportunities with students and partners. CDM students and alumni were celebrated for their many achievements— everything from leading the winning teams at the U.S. Cyber Challenge and Campus 1871 to showcasing their games at juried festivals and winning national screenwriting competitions. We encouraged greater research and teaching collaboration, both between our own schools and with units outside CDM. Design and Computing faculty are working together on an NSA grant for smart home devices that considers both software and interface/design, as well as a new grant-funded game lab. One Project Bluelight film team collaborated with The Theatre School and the School of Music while CDM and College of Science and Health faculty joined forces to research the links between traumatic brain injury, domestic violence, and deep games. It has been exciting and inspiring to witness the accomplishments of our innovative and dedicated community. We are proud to provide the space and resources for them to do their exceptional work. David MillerDean, College of Computing and Digital Mediahttps://via.library.depaul.edu/cdmannual/1001/thumbnail.jp

Understanding the Practice and Supporting the Creation of Design Systems

RÉSUMÉ : L’utilisabilité spécifie à quel point un système logiciel doit être facile, efficace, anti-erreur et agréable pour être utilisé par des utilisateurs humains. Au cours des deux à trois dernières années, de nombreuses entreprises et organisations qui développent des technologies de l’information et de la communication ont commencé à adopter des systèmes de conception qui aident à améliorer la convivialité de leurs produits. Ces entreprises et organisations ont généralement plus d’un produit sur différentes plates-formes, ce qui présente divers défis de conception tels que la cohérence, la maintenabilité, des coûts élevés et une mauvaise collaboration entre les équipes de conception. Les systèmes de conception aident à standardiser la conception de l’interaction utilisateur en créant des directives et des composants réutilisables pouvant être utilisés dans tous les produits et / ou versions de produits. Pour comprendre la popularité croissante des systèmes de conception, nous avons mené une étude d’analyse de contenu des problèmes de système de conception open source de GitHub. Nous avons constaté que les problèmes du système de conception consistent principalement en des rapports de bogues ou des demandes de fonctionnalités et en améliorant le comportement de l’interface utilisateur ou la conception visuelle des composants du système de conception.----------ABSTRACT : Usability specifies how easy, efficient, error-preventing, and pleasant a software system must be to be used by human users. In the recent two to three years, many companies and organizations that develop information and communication technologies have started to adopt design systems that help address the usability of their products. These companies and organizations usually have more than one product across different platforms, which introduces various design challenges such as consistency, maintainability, large costs, and poor collaboration between design teams. Design systems help standardize user interaction design by creating guidelines and reusable components that can be used across products and/or product versions. To understand the growing popularity of design systems, we first conducted a content analysis study of open-source design system issues from GitHub. We found that design system issues consist mainly of bug reports, feature requests and improvement of the UI behavior or visual design of design system components

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

Animate Being: Extending a Practice of the Image to New Mediums via Speculative Game Design

This post-disciplinary practice as research thesis examines the potential of Carl Jung's therapeutic method of active imagination as a strategy for engaging with an increasingly complex and interconnected technological reality. Embracing a non-clinical, practice-driven approach, I harness James Hillman’s notion of the image and the imaginal to investigate the interdisciplinary capacity and ethical dimensions of an expansive mode of image-work. My approach to practice theoretically and practically intertwines analytical psychology, feminist worlding and design speculation. Building upon Susan Rowland’s work, I study image-work as an ecological alchemical craft that seeks to matter the immaterial. Through the cyclic iterative design of a video game, I mobilise and respond to image-work as a mode of myth-making that may facilitate dialogue between human and non-human intelligences. Departing from the essentialism of the hero's journey, I adopt Le Guin's Carrier Bag (1986/2019) as a feminist video game form and by utilising the framework of a video game (Bogost, 2007; Flannigan, 2013), the alchemical processes of image-work are transformed into novel interactive game mechanics. The game I design is both a vessel and a portal to an imaginal ecological realm, an open-world, procedurally generated ‘living world’ sandbox exploration game. This game integrates real-time, real-world data streams to invite the non-human to enter into play as player two, facilitating experimentation with possible new forms of cross-species dialogue, collaboration, and healing

Service Futures, Proceedings of the fourth Service Design and Service Innovation Conference

ServDes2014 explores how Service Design is contributing to ‘Service Futures’ and how it is developing as a field of research and practice. We have witnessed how the concept and role of services in the economy and society have come a long way since its first definitions and studies. Services have moved from being a peripheral activity in a manufacturing - centred economy; to an engine for growth and society driven innovation. This transformation has been fully recognised with a flourishing of service innovation and service research studies aimed at deepening understanding; and at supporting the development of services both as a sector and as a concept. We suggest that Service Design is closely following this transformation. Starting from its initial focus on service interactions and experiences; Service Design research and practice have entered more strategic and transformational roles; dealing with issues of organisational change; system design; sustainability and social change; amongst others. Increasingly; Service Design is considering ways to integrate and collaborate with other service related disciplines. Also; questions are emerging on the future of this field; considering the growing areas of application and the expansion of the concept of service itself. ServDes2014 has brought these recent discussions and transformations to the fore and offered an ideal place to collectively reflect on and imagine that future. ServDes.2014 ran over three days: The first day was dedicated to practical explorations of Service Design with eight workshops led by both practitioners and academics; The second day was mostly focused on (long and short) papers presentations organised in three parallel sessions and two extra workshops; The third and final day was partly dedicated to papers presentation and came to an end with three parallel forums exploring the future of Service Design Research and Education and their relationship with Social Innovation. Working at the boundaries of Service Design; Digital and Social Innovation; the keynote speaker Dominic Campbell (Futuregov); projected novel spaces and responsibilities for Service Design in relation to complex societal transformational challenges; while Prof. Pelle Ehn (Malmö University); positioned it within a historical retrospective of Participatory Design in a constant search for more democratic (service) design practices. The conference was organised around five main themes which are reflected in the proceedings structure: Emerging Directions for Service Design; Design for Service Innovation and Transformation; Service Design and Implementation; Novel Service Design Frameworks and Tools; Service Design Across Organisations. Thanks to everyone who contributed and participated to this conference; and we look forward ServDes.2016 further developments and ideas

Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data