UrbanIxD: Exploring human interactions for the hybrid city

With the vision of ubiquitous computing becoming increasingly realised, a need is identified to create a better understanding of the relationship between person, place, and technology in the urban environment. The aim of this research in the field of Urban Interaction Design is to investigate how people’s emotional person-place relationships with personally meaningful places in their city of residence, can inform the design of technological devices and services that augment this urban lived experience in the hybrid city of the near future. Based on insights from social science studies of place attachment and research focusing on technology mediating the emotional experience of and in the urban environment, a holistic, human-centred bottom-up approach is taken. It investigates the full range of experiences-in-place and emotions from which emotional person-place relationships in the city develop. Using a three-staged, multimethod approach consisting of a Walking & Talking interview and two sedentary interviews with (speculative) evaluative map techniques, 45 emotional person-place relationships of eight residents of Edinburgh are investigated. This resulted in a taxonomy of 16 types of emotional experience-in-place, and identified potential for capturing, representing, consuming, and sharing emotional person-place relationship data based on different types of positive and negative emotional experience-in-place, different types of representations and sensorial experiences, the closeness of social relationships and shared interests, and to support the self-regulation of emotions. These main findings informed the design of a suite of three speculative design fictions in the form of two short films and a comic, to further explore this design space. These authentic, personally relevant, and provocative conversation pieces successfully engaged residents of Edinburgh in three focus groups on a human, personal level in an informed discussion, enabling critical reflection on current practices and interactions, and speculation about possible future scenarios for this unfamiliar design space. This contributed to a set of design guidelines for emotional experience-in-place. It serves as a framework for urban interaction designers to understand the context of, identify potential for, and inform the design of technological devices and services that leverage emotional person-place relationships in the hybrid city of the near future

Re-examining and re-conceptualising enterprise search and discovery capability: towards a model for the factors and generative mechanisms for search task outcomes.

Many organizations are trying to re-create the Google experience, to find and exploit their own corporate information. However, there is evidence that finding information in the workplace using search engine technology has remained difficult, with socio-technical elements largely neglected in the literature. Explication of the factors and generative mechanisms (ultimate causes) to effective search task outcomes (user satisfaction, search task performance and serendipitous encountering) may provide a first step in making improvements. A transdisciplinary (holistic) lens was applied to Enterprise Search and Discovery capability, combining critical realism and activity theory with complexity theories to one of the worlds largest corporations. Data collection included an in-situ exploratory search experiment with 26 participants, focus groups with 53 participants and interviews with 87 business professionals. Thousands of user feedback comments and search transactions were analysed. Transferability of findings was assessed through interviews with eight industry informants and ten organizations from a range of industries. A wide range of informational needs were identified for search filters, including a need to be intrigued. Search term word co-occurrence algorithms facilitated serendipity to a greater extent than existing methods deployed in the organization surveyed. No association was found between user satisfaction (or self assessed search expertise) with search task performance and overall performance was poor, although most participants had been satisfied with their performance. Eighteen factors were identified that influence search task outcomes ranging from user and task factors, informational and technological artefacts, through to a wide range of organizational norms. Modality Theory (Cybersearch culture, Simplicity and Loss Aversion bias) was developed to explain the study observations. This proposes that at all organizational levels there are tendencies for reductionist (unimodal) mind-sets towards search capability leading to fixes that fail. The factors and mechanisms were identified in other industry organizations suggesting some theory generalizability. This is the first socio-technical analysis of Enterprise Search and Discovery capability. The findings challenge existing orthodoxy, such as the criticality of search literacy (agency) which has been neglected in the practitioner literature in favour of structure. The resulting multifactorial causal model and strategic framework for improvement present opportunities to update existing academic models in the IR, LIS and IS literature, such as the DeLone and McLean model for information system success. There are encouraging signs that Modality Theory may enable a reconfiguration of organizational mind-sets that could transform search task outcomes and ultimately business performance

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Automated specification-based testing of graphical user interfaces

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrónica e de Computadores. 2006. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto, Departamento de Informática, Escola de Engenharia. Universidade do Minh

Memorias del V Congreso Internacional de Investigación de la Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Incluye todas las ponencias presentadas en el V Congreso Internacional de Investigación de la Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, realizado en noviembre del año 2015, divididas de la siguiente forma: - Mesas temáticas autoconvocadas. - Talleres. - Pósters. - Trabajos libres.Facultad de Psicologí