Human Machine Interaction

In this book, the reader will find a set of papers divided into two sections. The first section presents different proposals focused on the human-machine interaction development process. The second section is devoted to different aspects of interaction, with a special emphasis on the physical interaction

The SLIM (Social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) Final Report

Background: SLIM stands for 'Socuak Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale'. It is a multi-country research project funded by the European Commission (DG RESEARCH - 5th Framework Programme for research and technological development, 1998-2002). Its main theme is the investigation of the socio-economic aspects of the sustainable use of water. Within this theme, its main focus of interest lies in understanding the application of social learning as a conceptual framework, an operational principle, a policy instrument and a process of systemic change

9th Conference of EARLI's JURE "Models and learning: theory, design and application" : 30th June - 4th July 2006, Tartu, Estonia : [abstracts]

http://www.ester.ee/record=b2158682*es

Multi-agent system for simulation and validation of scenarios

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Staging urban emergence through collective creativity: Devising an outdoor mobile augmented reality tool

The unpredictability of global geopolitical conflicts, economic trends, and impacts of climate change, coupled with an increasing urban population, necessitates a more profound commitment to resilience thinking in urban planning and design. In contrast to top-down planning and designing for sustainability, allowing for emergence to take place seems to contribute to a capacity to better deal with this complex unpredictability, by allowing incremental changes through bottom-up, self-organized adaptation made by diverse actors in the proximity of various social, economical and functional entities in the urban context.The present thesis looks into the processes of creating urban emergence from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The theoretical section of the thesis first looks into the relationship between the processes and the qualities of a compact city. The Japanese city of Tokyo is used as an example of a resilient compact city that continuously emerges through incremental micro-adaptations by individual actors guided by urban rules that ‘let it happen’ without much central control or top-down design of the individual outcomes. The thesis then connects such rule-based emergent processes and the qualities of a compact city to complex adaptive system’s (CAS) theory, emphasizing the value of incremental and individual multiple-stakeholder input. The latter part of the thesis focuses on how to create a platform that can combine the bottom-up, emergent, rule-based planning approaches, and collective creativity based on individual participation and input from the public. This section is dedicated to developing a tool for a collaborative urban design using outdoor mobile augmented reality (MAR) by research-through-design method.The thesis thus has three parts addressing the topics: 1. urban planning processes and resulting urban qualities concerning compact city – i.e., density and diversity; 2. the processes of urban emergence, which generates complexity that renders urban resilience from the urban planning theory perspective; 3. developing a tool for non-expert citizens and other stakeholders to design and visualize an urban neighborhood by simulating the rule-based urban emergence using outdoor MAR. The results include a proposal for a complementary hybrid planning approaches that might approximate the CAS in urban systems with qualities that contribute to urban resiliency. Thereafter, the results describe specifications and design criteria for a tool as a public collaborative design platform using outdoor MAR to promote public participation: Urban CoBuilder. The processes of developing and prototyping such a tool to test various urban concepts concerning identified adaptive urban planning approaches are also presented with an assessment of the MAR tool based on focus group user tests. Future studies need to better include the potential of crowdsourcing public creativity through mass participation using the collaborative design tool and actual integration of these participatory design results in urban policies

Urban food strategies in Central and Eastern Europe: what's specific and what's at stake?

Integrating a larger set of instruments into Rural Development Programmes implied an increasing focus on monitoring and evaluation. Against the highly diversified experience with regard to implementation of policy instruments the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework has been set up by the EU Commission as a strategic and streamlined method of evaluating programmes’ impacts. Its indicator-based approach mainly reflects the concept of a linear, measure-based intervention logic that falls short of the true nature of RDP operation and impact capacity on rural changes. Besides the different phases of the policy process, i.e. policy design, delivery and evaluation, the regional context with its specific set of challenges and opportunities seems critical to the understanding and improvement of programme performance. In particular the role of local actors can hardly be grasped by quantitative indicators alone, but has to be addressed by assessing processes of social innovation. This shift in the evaluation focus underpins the need to take account of regional implementation specificities and processes of social innovation as decisive elements for programme performance.

Proceedings of the ECCS 2005 satellite workshop: embracing complexity in design - Paris 17 November 2005

Embracing complexity in design is one of the critical issues and challenges of the 21st century. As the realization grows that design activities and artefacts display properties associated with complex adaptive systems, so grows the need to use complexity concepts and methods to understand these properties and inform the design of better artifacts. It is a great challenge because complexity science represents an epistemological and methodological swift that promises a holistic approach in the understanding and operational support of design. But design is also a major contributor in complexity research. Design science is concerned with problems that are fundamental in the sciences in general and complexity sciences in particular. For instance, design has been perceived and studied as a ubiquitous activity inherent in every human activity, as the art of generating hypotheses, as a type of experiment, or as a creative co-evolutionary process. Design science and its established approaches and practices can be a great source for advancement and innovation in complexity science. These proceedings are the result of a workshop organized as part of the activities of a UK government AHRB/EPSRC funded research cluster called Embracing Complexity in Design (www.complexityanddesign.net) and the European Conference in Complex Systems (complexsystems.lri.fr). Embracing complexity in design is one of the critical issues and challenges of the 21st century. As the realization grows that design activities and artefacts display properties associated with complex adaptive systems, so grows the need to use complexity concepts and methods to understand these properties and inform the design of better artifacts. It is a great challenge because complexity science represents an epistemological and methodological swift that promises a holistic approach in the understanding and operational support of design. But design is also a major contributor in complexity research. Design science is concerned with problems that are fundamental in the sciences in general and complexity sciences in particular. For instance, design has been perceived and studied as a ubiquitous activity inherent in every human activity, as the art of generating hypotheses, as a type of experiment, or as a creative co-evolutionary process. Design science and its established approaches and practices can be a great source for advancement and innovation in complexity science. These proceedings are the result of a workshop organized as part of the activities of a UK government AHRB/EPSRC funded research cluster called Embracing Complexity in Design (www.complexityanddesign.net) and the European Conference in Complex Systems (complexsystems.lri.fr)