Distributed collaboration between industry and university partners in HE

Over the past three years the School of Design has been experimenting with an innovative curriculum design and delivery model named ‘the Global Studio’. The Global Studio is a cross-institutional research informed teaching and learning collaboration conducted between Northumbria University and international universities and industry partners based in the UK, USA, Netherlands and Korea. The aims of the Global Studio are directly linked with current and future industry needs that are related to changes in the organisation of product and service development. These changes highlight the importance of equipping design students with skills for working in globally networked organisations particularly the development of skills in intercultural communication and collaboration. In this paper we will focus on the Global Studio conducted in 2008 which included Northumbria University (UK), Hongik University (Korea), Auburn University (USA), Intel (USA), Motorola design studios located in the UK and Korea and Great Southern Wood (USA). These projects will be used to illustrate challenges and benefits of international collaborative industry-based projects undertaken in distributed settings

SMS text pre-notification and delivery of reminder e-mails to increase response rates to postal questionnaires in the SUSPEND trial : a factorial design, randomised controlled trial

Acknowledgements SUSPEND was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme (project 80/71/01) and will be published in full in Health Technology Assessment. The Health Services Research Unit of the University of Aberdeen is funded in part by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chief Scientist Office, HTA programme, NIHR, National Health Service, or Department of Health. The authors thank the SUSPEND staff and participants, without whom this study would not have been possible.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Ambiguous Mother-Figure in Harold Pinter’s The Room 87

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

Technology enhanced interaction framework

This paper focuses on the development of a general interaction framework to help design technology to support communication between people and improve interactions between people, technology and objects, particularly in complex situations. A review of existing interaction frameworks shows that none of them help technology designers and developers to consider all of the possible interactions that occur at the same time and in the same place. The main and sub-components of the framework are described and explained and examples are given for each type of interaction. Work is now in progress to provide designers with an easy to use tool that helps them apply the framework to create technology solutions to complex communication and interaction problems and situations

Feeling what you hear: tactile feedback for navigation of audio graphs

Access to digitally stored numerical data is currently very limited for sight impaired people. Graphs and visualizations are often used to analyze relationships between numerical data, but the current methods of accessing them are highly visually mediated. Representing data using audio feedback is a common method of making data more accessible, but methods of navigating and accessing the data are often serial in nature and laborious. Tactile or haptic displays could be used to provide additional feedback to support a point-and-click type interaction for the visually impaired. A requirements capture conducted with sight impaired computer users produced a review of current accessibility technologies, and guidelines were extracted for using tactile feedback to aid navigation. The results of a qualitative evaluation with a prototype interface are also presented. Providing an absolute position input device and tactile feedback allowed the users to explore the graph using tactile and proprioceptive cues in a manner analogous to point-and-click techniques

Pedestrian Detection with Wearable Cameras for the Blind: A Two-way Perspective

Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings, which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable cameras can provide equitable access to such information. However, the always-on nature of these assistive technologies poses privacy concerns for parties that may get recorded. We explore this tension from both perspectives, those of sighted passersby and blind users, taking into account camera visibility, in-person versus remote experience, and extracted visual information. We conduct two studies: an online survey with MTurkers (N=206) and an in-person experience study between pairs of blind (N=10) and sighted (N=40) participants, where blind participants wear a working prototype for pedestrian detection and pass by sighted participants. Our results suggest that both of the perspectives of users and bystanders and the several factors mentioned above need to be carefully considered to mitigate potential social tensions.Comment: The 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020