The spirit of exhibition and visual pedagogy in the work of Charles and Ray Eames

This project examines the ways in which Charles and Ray Eames promoted visual pedagogy in their exhibitions and new media experiments. Through cooperative efforts with various artists, designers, educators, scholars, museums, corporations, and institutions, the Eameses refined methods of visual communication to create effective experiential learning spaces. Within these spaces, the Eameses developed strategies that sought to unite art, science, and technology as well as underline the value of visual literacy within the new media landscape. By analyzing the Eameses' collaborations, interdisciplinary educational initiatives, exhibition designs, multimedia presentations, and didactic films, I reveal the ways in which the designers constructed pedagogical environments through the experimental use of new media. This dissertation seeks to ground Charles and Ray Eames in their historical moment, illustrating the ways in which the Eameses' work anticipated, engaged, and reflected contemporary theoretical developments in vision, media, and interdisciplinary education. The Eameses believed new media had the potential to dissolve the artificial categorization of academic disciplines: film could be used to teach mathematics; toys could provide insight into fine art; and technology could help to create a visually literate populace. Consequently, the Eameses combined traditional display models and new media in highly choreographed spaces that relied on objects and images to communicate cultural histories, ideas, and values.Includes bibliographical references (pages 304-318)

Building chatbots from large scale domain-specific knowledge bases: challenges and opportunities

Popular conversational agents frameworks such as Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and Google Actions (gActions) offer unprecedented opportunities for facilitating the development and deployment of voice-enabled AI solutions in various verticals. Nevertheless, understanding user utterances with high accuracy remains a challenging task with these frameworks. Particularly, when building chatbots with large volume of domain-specific entities. In this paper, we describe the challenges and lessons learned from building a large scale virtual assistant for understanding and responding to equipment-related complaints. In the process, we describe an alternative scalable framework for: 1) extracting the knowledge about equipment components and their associated problem entities from short texts, and 2) learning to identify such entities in user utterances. We show through evaluation on a real dataset that the proposed framework, compared to off-the-shelf popular ones, scales better with large volume of entities being up to 30% more accurate, and is more effective in understanding user utterances with domain-specific entities

Sacred Heart University Magazine, Winter 1996

Featured: Cover article: Sid Gottlieb\u27s new book of essays and interviews by Alfred Hitchcock --Calendar --Memories from the unforgettable season nearly a decade ago since Sacred Heart became the first New England university to win the NCAA Division II national title --Education Assistant Professor Lauren Kempton conducting interviews for Steven Spielberg’s videotape archive of firsthand accounts by Holocaust survivors --Toward Greater Understanding, published by the newly established Sacred Heart University Press, honors Cardinal John O’Connor’s contributions to furthering Christian-Jewish relations --Cesar Munoz ’95 returned from a month in El Salvador with a video and a story of people who endure amid squalor and violence --Alumni profile on Beverly Lieberman \u2786 --Recent authors and video producers on the University faculty were honored for their achievements at a presidential reception in December (photo) --Speaking before a capacity crowd in the Academic Center on Nov. 30, Maya Angelou implored young people to “use your energies to make this country more than what it is today, more than what James Baldwin called these yet-to-be United States” --Scorecard --Practicing what they teach: University reaches out with Operation Bridgeport

When data changes pre-purchase behavior : the effects of information visualization on online information seeking

Online consumer information search became a crucial initial step in the purchase decision process. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate and measure the effects of different visual representations of information about products on individual’s behavior during pre-purchase online information seeking activities. More specifically, this dissertation analyze what type of information customers considered most important and pays more attention and what is the extent of the visual aspect and its impact in information seeking behavior. To do so, five experiments were conducted, three using online participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk, and two using participants in a laboratory setting, being collected biological measures in one of them. Through two studies, the first article shows how different degrees of evaluability of the same online review can influence on helpfulness, overestimation of information, and purchase intention. It also evidence individual’s involvement while browsing has a moderating role in the relation between evaluability and helpfulness as well as in the relation between evaluability and purchase intention. The second article analyze the relationship between depth-of-field and type of search on several behavioral outcomes, such as intention do revisit the website and visual appeal. It was also investigated whether or not involvement, expertise and attitude toward products moderates these relations. Drawing on the findings of the first and second articles, the third article focus on replicate the finding of the second article via biological measures using an eye-tracking device, including attention measures. The third article aims to contribute to online information seeking literature by investigating participant’s online search and browse behaviors and the resulting processing of information when viewing products presented visually differently in a webpage. These patterns of individual’s visualization studied in both three articles have important practical implications for the website design creating experiences that supports the type of information search undertaken by consumers

Strategic capability through business intelligence applications

This thesis analyzes the potential strategic capability that can be improved from the deployment of business intelligence (BI) applications. AOK Niedersachsen (AOKN), a German health insurance company in the north of Germany (Lower-Saxony), is used as the case study for primary qualitative research and analysis. For many years, information and data have been considered even “factors of production” for companies; but data and information have become more complex, requiring processing and structural analysis to get the needed transparency in the company. Data from different operational sources must be extracted and structured to provide information for management accounting employees, top management, and end-users throughout an organization. In the healthcare industry, BI systems have played a crucial role for decades. For organizations such as AOKN, the application of BI tools and technologies can create and support sustainable capability. Several research questions are answered in this thesis through structured one-to-one interviews with different AOKN employees, and the resulting analysis of interview data. A qualitative approach to this case study is used, allowing the researcher to get in-depth information about a specific context. When case studies are conducted, the one-to-one interview is considered to be an optimal instrument and a significant source of evidence. BI technologies and tools are classified within an appropriate conceptual framework which integrates the complex BI demands and structures of AOKN, identifying different components as part of the framework - systems infrastructure, data provision, reporting, and information receiver. The framework is further enhanced by four factors of a competitive advantage model drawn from existing literature to develop capabilities. The use and integration of BI technologies and tools in the strategy development process are then analyzed. Different BI tools, that have an important function during the whole strategy process, are recommended for each strategy phase. The final area of research examines the possible addition of new functions and solutions to current BI technologies and tools to enhance the potential of these systems in gaining capabilities. Research findings encompass system access, report characteristics, and BI end users profiles and capabilities. To this end, a structured model gives examples of practical AOKN BI projects that have generated strategic capabilities for the organization. At the end, the conclusion chapter stresses the needs of contribution to knowledge (theory and practice)

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Design as a functional leader: a case study to investigate the role of design as a potential leading discipline in multinational organisations

This research investigates the role of design as a ‘functional leader’1 in multinational organisations, to drive innovation successfully at a strategic level. It involved a detailed case study of the innovation process, and practices within Philips Design, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, where design is a key function within the company but not yet recognised as a leading strategic discipline. Philips Design wanted design research to build an integrated map of its actual practices and correlate these with other corporate innovation practices, to help establish strategic recognition for their value. The doctoral challenge was to explicate the process and determine whether the findings have generic capacity to support the role of design as a leading functional discipline. The investigation integrates an iterative loop of; abductive reasoning of design thinking and inductive reasoning of management thinking in an action research cycle. The case study was an empirical enquiry, where the researcher became a ‘participatory observer’ at Philips Design, conducting one-on-one interviews for data collection and refining their analysis using a Delphi Technique. The contribution to knowledge has been generated by combining these research methods to represent data in a logical manner using visual mapping techniques to produce an explicitly defined ‘design innovation process map’ for Philips Design. Comparison with three other multinational organisations explored how each perceives the contribution of design and the different roles it plays in their organisation. Triangulation with a third party expert was also used to validate the findings. The correlation of the research with literature in the field explored the relationship between human behaviour, organisational culture and business innovation cycles and took this an incremental step forward by visually illustrating the conceptual relationship between different theories. The focus became understanding the reasons for the differences between the thinkers and the practitioners in a design team. Significantly, this led to it validating the theory of ‘Design Driven Innovation’ by Roberto Verganti (2009). The study contributes value to his theory of innovation by highlighting four gaps in its application in multinational organisations and demonstrates that design can share the role of innovation leadership with other important functions only if it has an explicit process that aligns with organisational brand values and communicates the value generated by design effectively to the wider team. Therefore, whilst the research has not been able to confirm whether design can lead an effective innovation process at a strategic level, rather it needs to share this role in multinational organisations, it has identified the major reason for this as the differences between design team thinkers trying to find viable options for the future and practitioners trying to defend the core business in their organisation, resulting in a gap between strategy and operation. The research has confirmed the conditions for design to act as a leading functional discipline and provided design practitioners with tools that can help in strategic decision-making. It is hoped this research will inspire design researchers to carry out further study on the topic to improve and develop knowledge and competency to support the strategic role of design as a leading functional discipline in organisations. Also, that business, strategy and marketing researchers will be inspired to generate theories that could link the strategic role of the design innovation process to strategies in their own fields. Finally, the research identifies the need for quantitative research to explain the qualitative conceptual relationships it has depicted between designer behaviour and organisational culture in the different innovation cycles that exist in multinational organisations

IAIN BAXTER& and N.E. THING CO.: A Study in Pop-Inflected Conceptual Art

The Canadian artist IAIN BAXTER&, known before 2005 as Iain Baxter, created an innovative Conceptual Art practice in the mid-60s that continues to make important contributions even today. He has maintained a strong collaborative element in his art, as witnessed by his role in the short-lived group IT (1965) and N.E. THING CO. (1966-1978)--an actual incorporated company consisting of BAXTER& and his first wife, Ingrid Baxter as chief officers--and by the addition of an ampersand to his legal name in 2005 to signify the open-ended quality of his work that relies on viewers‘ contributions to help determine its meaning. This dissertation introduces the term Pop-inflected Conceptual Art to describe how BAXTER& merges his use of information technologies, modern and ubiquitous materials, and pedestrian activities with a desire to question the received role and purpose of art through an epistemological approach. By presenting BAXTER&‘s key influences—Zen Buddhism, as described by D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, and the communications theory of Marshall McLuhan—this study describes five underlying principles that inform BAXTER&‘s work individually and in unison. These principles are: his preference for foregrounding the banal; creation of the infoscape that merges the natural world and the constant stream of information within North American culture; proclivity for experimenting with such unlikely media as plastics and telecommunication media; understanding of art‘s kinship with language; and usage of pseudonyms. This study describes the core terms of McLuhan‘s theory in order to analyze this thinker‘s significance for BAXTER&‘s work; moreover, it presents how the above five principles are evident throughout the three main divisions in BAXTER&‘s artistic career: before, during, and after his tenure with N.E. THING CO. Through an analysis of key examples of many of this artist‘s works, this study also determines affinities to both established Pop artists and his Conceptual Art peers, while distinguishing how his Zen and McLuhanesque hybrid approach, which includes a consistent reliance on humor to communicate definitively his ideas, sets him apart from these groups of artists and foregrounds his role as the precursor to such younger Vancouver photoconceptual artists as Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, and Stan Douglas

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history