Designing for Lived Health: Engaging the Sociotechnical Complexity of Care Work

As healthcare is increasingly shaped by everyday interaction with data and technologies, there is a widespread interest in creating information systems that help people actively participate in managing their own health and wellness. To date, personal health technologies are largely designed as large-scale “patient-centered” systems, grounded in a biomedical model of care and clinical processes and/or commercial “self-care” technologies, that seek to facilitate individual behavior change through activities like fitness tracking. Through investigating the lived experience of chronic illness—multiple, messy, and often the site of uncomfortable dependencies—my thesis empirically and theoretically engages the limitations of such popular design narratives to address sociotechnical complexities in personal health management. My findings, drawn from people’s care practices across three distinct field sites, argue for a need to contend with lived health: the ways in which everyday health and wellness activities are connected to wider ecologies of care that include the emotional labor of family and friends, entanglements of data, machineries and bodies, localized networks of resources and expertise, and contested forms of information work. My thesis contributes to the literature of Information and Computer Science in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work by offering an alternative analytical lens for designing health systems that support a wider range of people’s social and emotional needs.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146030/1/eskaziu_1.pd

Sustainable Value Co-Creation in Welfare Service Ecosystems : Transforming temporary collaboration projects into permanent resource integration

The aim of this paper is to discuss the unexploited forces of user-orientation and shared responsibility to promote sustainable value co-creation during service innovation projects in welfare service ecosystems. The framework is based on the theoretical field of public service logic (PSL) and our thesis is that service innovation seriously requires a user-oriented approach, and that such an approach enables resource integration based on the service-user’s needs and lifeworld. In our findings, we identify prerequisites and opportunities of collaborative service innovation projects in order to transform these projects into sustainable resource integration once they have ended

Augmented Dissent: The Affordances of ICTs for Citizen Protest (A Case Study of the Ukraine Euromaidan Protests of 2013-2014).

This dissertation research project uses the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine to inform and shape a theory of augmented dissent to help explain the complex ways in which protest participants guided by the political, social, and cultural contexts engage in dissent augmented by ICTs in a reality where both the physical and the digital are used in concert. The purpose of this research is to conceptualize the use and perception of ICTs in protest activity using the communicative affordances framework. Through a mixed-method research approach involving interviews with protest participants, as well as qualitative and thematic analysis of online content from social media pages of several key Euromaidan protest communities, the research project examines the role ICTs played in the information and media landscape during the Euromaidan protest. The findings of the online content analysis were used to inform the questions for the 59 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with Euromaidan protest participants in Ukraine and abroad. The research findings provide in-depth insights about how ICTs were used and perceived by protest participants, and their role as vehicles for information and civic media content. The study employs the theoretical framework of social media affordances to interpret the data gathered during the interviews and content analysis to better understand how digital media augmented citizens’ protest activity through affording them new possibilities for dissent, and how they made meaning of said protest activity as augmented by ICTs. The findings contribute towards shaping a theory of digitally augmented dissent that conceptualizes the complex relationship between citizens and ICTs during protest activity as an affordance-driven one, where online and offline tools and activity merge into a unified dissent space and extend or augment the possibilities for action in interesting, and sometimes unexpected ways. Such a conceptual model could inform broader theories about civic participation and digital activism in the post-Soviet world and beyond, as ICTs become an inseparable part of civic life