Wicked Problems and Gnarly Results: Reflecting on Design and Evaluation Methods for Idiosyncratic Personal Information Management Tasks

This paper is a case study of an artifact design and evaluation process; it is a reflection on how right thinking about design methods may at times result in sub-optimal results. Our goal has been to assess our decision making process throughout the design and evaluation stages for a software prototype in order to consider where design methodology may need to be tuned to be more sensitive to the domain of practice, in this case software evaluation in personal information management. In particular, we reflect on design methods around (1) scale of prototype, (2) prototyping and design process, (3) study design, and (4) study population

The 'memoir problem', revisited.

The ‘memoir problem’ revisited “That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir”. Neil Gunzlinger, book reviewer for the New York Times, griped in a review of yet another confessional memoir. It’s true; suddenly everyone is writing memoir, even people who only ever wrote fiction, rock music or poetry, or never wrote before. I even find myself writing memoir, but mining some of my own fictional writing for triggers and nudges, delving into old poems for clues and lines of inquiry. After all, the memory does not always linger on. Now, since revisiting this autobiographical writing as a resource for chapters of my Creative Nonfiction PhD thesis, a food memoir, in this paper I’ll discuss attempts made to fictionalise the ‘true’ events of the stories, and the uses made of them, to revitalise memoir. I also reflect on the work of controversial memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose six-volume work, ‘My struggle’, has offended members of his extended family, critics and purists, or simply bored many readers with the impossibly detailed accounts of his life, to ask again of memoir, “Should it be artful or truthful?

Four Responses to Prof. Dharampal\u27s Bharatiya Chitta Manas and Kala

For decades Prof. Dharampal has been well-known and respected for his research on eighteenth-century India; his analyses of a wide range of social, cultural, political economic and technological issues have been respected and valued during this time. Bharatiya Chitta manas and Kala -- perhaps, The Indian Sense of Consciousness, Mind and Time -- is both a continuation of his earlier work and a new venture in reflection on larger and more elusive religious and cultural issues

If CPM is so bad, why have we been using it so long?

Why has the Critical Path Method (CPM) been used so widely for so long given its inability to produce predictable outcomes? For shedding light on this paradox, the formative period of the CPM is analysed from two main angles. First, how was the CPM embedded into the construction management practice? Second, what was the methodological underpinning of the development of the CPM? These questions are researched through a literature review. In terms of embeddedness into practice, it turns out that the CPM morphed from being a way of production control, into a method for contract control. In consequence, the promotion of the CPM by owners has been crucial for pushing this method to be the mainstream approach to scheduling and production control. Regarding methodological underpinning, it turns out that the CPM was developed as a way of optimization, as part of the quantitative methods movement. This movement was largely based on the axiomatic approach to research. In good alignment with that approach, there was no attempt to empirically test quantitative models and their outcomes. In this context, the unrealistic assumptions and conceptualizations in CPM did not surface in forty years. These results are argued to be helpful in critical discussions on the role and merits of CPM and on the methodologies to be used in construction management research

Methodological development

Book description: Human-Computer Interaction draws on the fields of computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and organisational and social sciences in order to understand how people use and experience interactive technology. Until now, researchers have been forced to return to the individual subjects to learn about research methods and how to adapt them to the particular challenges of HCI. This is the first book to provide a single resource through which a range of commonly used research methods in HCI are introduced. Chapters are authored by internationally leading HCI researchers who use examples from their own work to illustrate how the methods apply in an HCI context. Each chapter also contains key references to help researchers find out more about each method as it has been used in HCI. Topics covered include experimental design, use of eyetracking, qualitative research methods, cognitive modelling, how to develop new methodologies and writing up your research

Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation

Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and programs that will be as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today. Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users. Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers would also avoid burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available. Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is remarkable to outsiders. Why does their progress seem stalled? Ineffective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory

Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what it actually is. When asked to discuss the source of their inspiration, individual artists describe a process that is intrinsically ineffable. Rights theorists of all varieties have generally subscribed to this understanding, describing creativity in terms of an individual liberty whose form remains largely unspecified. Economic theorists of copyright work from the opposite end of the creative process, seeking to divine the optimal rules for promoting creativity by measuring its marketable byproducts. But these theorists offer no particular reason to think that marketable byproducts are either an appropriate proxy or an effective stimulus for creativity (as opposed to production), and more typically refuse to engage the question. The upshot is that the more we talk about creativity, the more it disappears from view. At the same time, the mainstream of intellectual property scholarship has persistently overlooked a broad array of social science methodologies that provide both descriptive tools for constructing ethnographies of creative processes and theoretical tools for modeling them

Book Review: Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali\u27s Child Revisited

A review of Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali\u27s Child Revisited by Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana

To Re:Make, To Re:Do, To Re:Think - Localised Production in a Globalised World

To live in a global world is to be constantly aware of our own lives and histories and how they may merge and blend with others. Taking a practitioner-led approach to design, and the production of cultural artifacts, this paper will draw on the author’s response to a number of global and cross cultural references and show how these references have been translated into a range of clothing items. The first of these objects are a jacket and waistcoat developed as a response to the Global Denim project in which the discarded jeans, through a process of deconstruction were converted into something ‘new’. This newness grew out of the previous owners no longer having a use for the garments and a contention that they no longer fitted into changing notions of their identity and lifestyles. The second object to be analysed is a garment developed as a response to Yinka Shonibare’s work and within this aspects of global production and communication will be discussed. It will investigate symbolism within textile production processes, motifs and shape and form as well as providing a critique of Shonibare’s work. The relationship of the objects to global processes will be viewed through the lens of sustainability and in particular how production methods, especially those based in a studio environment, have the potential to impact on notions of social enterprise and design activism. To this aim reflection on the authors approach to design and the shaping of ‘fashion’ inspired objects with be provided together with an investigation into how models of social enterprise may be developed to have relevance to global processes. Theories relating to aspects of liquid modernity and global identities will also frame discussion into how objects become personalised and lead to a transformation of self