Influencing interaction: Development of the design with intent method

Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction. The Design with Intent Method, a ‘suggestion tool’ addressing this problem, is introduced in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the method’s usability and guide the direction of its development. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior

Sustainability Debt: A Metaphor to Support Sustainability Design Decisions

Sustainability, the capacity to endure, is fundamental for the societies on our planet. Despite its increasing recognition in software engineering, it remains difficult to assess the delayed systemic effects of decisions taken in requirements engineering and systems design. To support this difficult task, this paper introduces the concept of sustainability debt. The metaphor helps in the discovery, documentation, and communication of sustainability issues in requirements engineering. We build on the existing metaphor of technical debt and extend it to four other dimensions of sustainability to help think about sustainability-aware software systems engineering. We highlight the meaning of debt in each dimension and the relationships between those dimensions. Finally, we discuss the use of the metaphor and explore how it can help us to design sustainability-aware software intensive systems

The design with intent method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour

The official published version can be found at the link below.Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human–technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Chemical communication between synthetic and natural cells: a possible experimental design

The bottom-up construction of synthetic cells is one of the most intriguing and interesting research arenas in synthetic biology. Synthetic cells are built by encapsulating biomolecules inside lipid vesicles (liposomes), allowing the synthesis of one or more functional proteins. Thanks to the in situ synthesized proteins, synthetic cells become able to perform several biomolecular functions, which can be exploited for a large variety of applications. This paves the way to several advanced uses of synthetic cells in basic science and biotechnology, thanks to their versatility, modularity, biocompatibility, and programmability. In the previous WIVACE (2012) we presented the state-of-the-art of semi-synthetic minimal cell (SSMC) technology and introduced, for the first time, the idea of chemical communication between synthetic cells and natural cells. The development of a proper synthetic communication protocol should be seen as a tool for the nascent field of bio/chemical-based Information and Communication Technologies (bio-chem-ICTs) and ultimately aimed at building soft-wet-micro-robots. In this contribution (WIVACE, 2013) we present a blueprint for realizing this project, and show some preliminary experimental results. We firstly discuss how our research goal (based on the natural capabilities of biological systems to manipulate chemical signals) finds a proper place in the current scientific and technological contexts. Then, we shortly comment on the experimental approaches from the viewpoints of (i) synthetic cell construction, and (ii) bioengineering of microorganisms, providing up-to-date results from our laboratory. Finally, we shortly discuss how autopoiesis can be used as a theoretical framework for defining synthetic minimal life, minimal cognition, and as bridge between synthetic biology and artificial intelligence.Comment: In Proceedings Wivace 2013, arXiv:1309.712

Understanding feedback in online learning - A critical review and metaphor analysis

Technologies associated with online learning have led to many new feedback practices and expanded the meaning of feedback beyond the traditional focus on instructor comments, but conceptual work on online feedback has not followed. This paper investigates how online learning researchers understand feedback's role in teaching and learning, and discusses how these understandings influence what research questions are asked, and what online feedback practices are recommended. Through a qualitative analysis of the language used about feedback in leading research journals, we identified six distinct understandings of feedback based on six dominant conceptual metaphors. These are feedback is a treatment, feedback is a costly commodity, feedback is coaching, feedback is a command, feedback is a dialogue, and feedback is a learner tool. Each of these metaphors offers a coherent frame of entailments related to the roles and responsibilities of online instructors and online learners as well as some bigger assumptions about what role feedback should play in online teaching and learning. A comparison with current feedback research revealed that just two of the six metaphors align with the learner-centric feedback practices that are increasingly considered appropriate among feedback researchers. The paper discusses how the conceptualizations might reflect different challenges facing online education. The paper proposes that researchers interrogate their own conceptualizations to ensure that they align with their beliefs about feedback and its role in the learning process. It suggests that a more deliberate use of metaphors when conceptualizing feedback and online feedback practices is necessary for clarity of communication and helpful for driving the work on feedback in online learning forward

Creativity In Conscience Society

Creativity is a result of brain activity which differentiates individuals and could ensure an important competitive advantage for persons, for companies, and for Society in general. Very innovative branches – like software industry, computer industry, car industry – consider creativity as the key of business success. Natural Intelligence Creativity can develop basic creative activities, but Artificial Intelligence Creativity, and, especially, Conscience Intelligence Creativity should be developed and they could be enhanced over the level of Natural Intelligence. Providing only neurological research still does not offer a scientific basis for understanding creativity but thousand years of creative natural intelligence behavior observations offer some algorithms, models, methods, guidelines and procedures which could be used successfully in Conscience Society Creativity. Present Essay discusses the evolution of the notion of Creativity (what it is, why it is important, where it is used), analyzes creativity from basic point of view (Creativity as a Brain Activity; Mastering Daily Life; Creativity and Profession; Piirto’s six Steps; When and where Creativity Occurs; How Creative People are looked upon), and also manages Individual Creativity and Company Goals (Individual Creativity; Teams, Creativity and Product Development; Company’s Product Development Goals; Entrepreneur’s and Small Companies’ Product Development).creativity, intuition, spirituality, conscience society, natural intelligence, artificial intelligence.