Presenting the networked home: a content analysis of promotion material of Ambient Intelligence applications

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) for the home uses information and communication technologies to make users’ everyday life more comfortable. AmI is still in its developmental phase and is headed towards the first stages of diffusion. \ud Characteristics of AmI design can be observed, among others, in the promotion material of initial producers. A literature study revealed that AmI originally envisioned a central role for the user, convenience that AmI offers them and that attention should be paid to critical policy issues such as privacy and a potential loss of freedom. A content analysis of current promotion material of several high-tech companies revealed that these original ideas are not all reflected in the material. Attributes which were used most in the promotion material were ‘connectedness’, ‘control’, ‘easiness’ and ‘personalization’. An analysis of the pictures in the promotion material showed that almost half of the pictures contained no humans but appliances. These results only partly correspond to the original vision on AmI, since the emphasis is now on technology. The results represent a serious problem, since both users, as well as critical policy issues are underexposed in the current promotion material

“No powers, man!”: A student perspective on designing university smart building interactions

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management

CON-TEMPORARY LIVING. UNEXPECTED HOUSING SOLUTIONS IN PUBLIC SPACES

In this book we will analyse the meaning of the word temporary in relation to the change between space and time, time and use, use and memory. Specifically, we will look at the value of the temporary nature of design as applied to the world, the city and its inhabitants, the temporary urban solutions (Fassi, 2012), and finally the key place designed to host people’s life: the home. Although it can be said that today the meaning of the term “living” is broader and indicates more than a place to sleep, and therefore to the small domestic space of a house. This is shown by the fact that today we live at work, we live on the go, we live in the movement, but, the house still plays a central role (Galluzzo, 2018). We will then draw up a categorization of the different types of temporary housing. Examples that in the world of design are multiple and, especially in recent years, have increased exponentially. Temporary design has become an excellent instrument to occupy peripheral, degraded and underutilized areas of the city, to give them a new personality and new value, and to then find a more permanent form of use for them. In this sense, the temporary city is one that takes its least used areas and aspects and transforms them to accommodate new uses, new identities and new inhabitants

Revenue requirements for mobile operators with ultra-high mobile broadband data traffic growth.

Mobile broadband data access over cellular networks has been established as a major new service in just a few years. The mobile broadband penetration has risen from almost zero to between 10 and 15 per cent in Western European leading markets from 2007 to the end of 2009. More than 75% of network traffic was broadband data in 2009, and the data volumes are growing rapidly. But the revenue generation is the reverse as the average for operators in Europe in 2009 was around 77 per cent of service revenues from voice, 10 per cent from SMS and 13 per cent from other data. Voice and broadband data service are built on two quite different business models. Voice pricing is volume based. Revenue depends linearly on the number of voice minutes. Broadband data service on the other hand is mainly flat fee based even if different levels are being introduced as well as tiers. Revenue is decoupled from traffic and therefore also from operating costs and investment requirements. This is what we define as a revenue gap. Earnings as well as internal financing will suffer from increasing traffic per user unless the flat fee can be raised or changed to volume based, other revenue can be obtained and/or operating costs and investments can be reduced accordingly. Observable trends and common forecasts indicate strong growth of mobile broadband traffic as well as declining revenue from mobile voice in the next five year period. This outlook suggests a prospective revenue gap with weak top-line growth and expanding operating costs and investment requirements. This is not only a profitability and cash flow issue. It may also severely restrict the industry's revenue and profit growth potential if it is handled mainly by cost-cutting. In sections 2 - 4 we describe related work, our contribution, the specific research questions as well as the methodology and its problems. Section 5 is an overview of mobile operators' revenue, its sources and development till today. Section 6 presents trends, developments and published forecasts that may be relevant for the future. Section 7 contains our conclusions. --Mobile broadband,mobile operator revenues,revenue requirements,voice revenues,non-voice revenues

The impact of the internet of things on mobile workers

Ongoing developments in digital, computer, and communication technologies are likely to have profound long-term consequences for the nature of work and employment (Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2016). One significant area of development concerns the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT can be described as everyday objects, such as cars, fridges or watches, having internet connectivity allowing them to send and receive data. The IoT is predicted to be a major IT-enabled business trend over the next 10 years. Peppet (2014) suggests the potential for 200 billion connected devices by 2020 and a trillion by 2025, and Mishra et al. (2016) note that according to McKinsey (2013), IoT has a potential global economic impact of $36 trillion. A recent Computing (2016) report indicates that in the UK, applications of the IoT in work settings are most likely to involve the use of tracking devices for internal deployment to achieve cost optimization. For example, an English county police force are deploying an IoT platform to create connected vehicles and 4G streaming cameras that are lightweight and wearable and can stream high definition video. Internet-connected police cars allow police officers to use laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers in their vehicles giving them access to important information while working remotely (Palmer, 2015). Thus, the IoT has the potential to have significant impacts on the organization and management of mobile workers. This study will examine the impact of IoT technologies on mobile work in UK organizations. The main emphasis of the project is to develop user-centric considerations of digital technologies to counterbalance techno-centric research on this topic: the users in this study are defined as both organizations and individual workers. This is partly because various concerns have been raised regarding surveillance implications of these technologies for workers (O’Connor, 2015). This exploratory study has two aims: 1) to understand organizational drivers for the adoption of IoT for mobile work; 2) to explore how IoT technologies impact on mobile workers