Rethinking Map Legends with Visualization

This design paper presents new guidance for creating map legends in a dynamic environment. Our contribution is a set of guidelines for legend design in a visualization context and a series of illustrative themes through which they may be expressed. These are demonstrated in an applications context through interactive software prototypes. The guidelines are derived from cartographic literature and in liaison with EDINA who provide digital mapping services for UK tertiary education. They enhance approaches to legend design that have evolved for static media with visualization by considering: selection, layout, symbols, position, dynamism and design and process. Broad visualization legend themes include: The Ground Truth Legend, The Legend as Statistical Graphic and The Map is the Legend. Together, these concepts enable us to augment legends with dynamic properties that address specific needs, rethink their nature and role and contribute to a wider re-evaluation of maps as artifacts of usage rather than statements of fact. EDINA has acquired funding to enhance their clients with visualization legends that use these concepts as a consequence of this work. The guidance applies to the design of a wide range of legends and keys used in cartography and information visualization

Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory

Rethinking Research Partnerships: Discussion Guide and Toolkit

In recent years, there has been a drive towards research collaboration between academics and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs). These new partnerships offer exciting opportunities to improve learning and practice in international development, leading to innovation and deepened understandings of the world and, ultimately, a better impact on poverty eradication. However, they also present considerable challenges. How do organisations with different structures, goals and interests collaborate? Can they work together productively around these differences? What tensions exist and what is the impact of these? How is power distributed and which voices are amplified or lost in the process? This guide does not seek to answer these questions, but offers a way of exploring them. It is aimed at people and organisations that are considering embarking on a research collaboration, or are already working in partnership. It introduces some of the key issues that arise when working collaboratively, and suggests tools and activities to help you to critically reflect on them. The guide is aimed at those at the forefront of these partnerships – academics, INGO staff and their respective institutions. However, the content will also be of relevance to funders and others seeking to support or encourage collaborative research approaches. This guide is a toolkit for critical reflection, rooted in the idea that research partnerships must be entered into with care. Attention needs to be given to contexts, power relations and the different interests involved in order to successfully deliver truly collaborative knowledge generation that serves everyone’s interests. The risks are real – partnerships without serious considerations of the power dynamics risk reaffirming certain interests and voices and marginalising others, particularly those already experiencing structural disadvantage, undermining the real benefit that these partnerships can bring. In addition, they can end up placing unfunded and unsupported burdens on particular individuals or organisations, and reinforce existing structures that constrain the intended learning and growth

Towards an understanding of the social aspects of sustainability in product design: teaching HE students in the UK and Ireland through reflection and peer learning

This paper presents findings from a doctoral study, which investigated effective methods for teaching social sustainability within product design courses in British and Irish universities. This paper explores approaches for encouraging students to explore the social aspects of sustainable product design through workshops specifically designed to foster deep learning through collaboration, discovery and critical reflection. The importance of deep learning is reflected in both the sustainable design education (O’Rafferty et al., 2008, Griffith and Bamford, 2007) and education for sustainability literature (Warburton, 2003) as important to an understanding of the holistic and complex nature of sustainability. Three 'Rethinking Design' workshops were designed and developed as part of the doctoral main study to introduce students to the wider social aspects of sustainability and these were conducted in five universities in Britain and Ireland. The workshops were developed to foster principles that encourage students to adopt deep learning methods, taking into account the specific learning preferences of the current generation of students to enhance motivational factors such as relevance, appropriate teaching materials and opportunities for collaborative learning. The workshops were tested amongst 150 undergraduate and postgraduate students and found to be successful in fostering deep learning by facilitating learning through discovery, critical reflection, peer learning and creativity leading to an exploration of design thinking solutions

Autism, the Integrations of 'Difference' and the Origins of Modern Human Behaviour

It is proposed here that the archaeological evidence for the emergence of 'modern behaviour' (160,000-40,000 bp) can best be explained as the rise of cognitive variation within populations through social mechanisms for integrating 'different minds', rather than by the development of a single 'modern human mind'. Autism and the autistic spectrum within human populations are used as an example of 'different minds' which when integrated within society can confer various selective benefits. It is proposed that social mechanisms for incorporating autistic difference are visible in the archaeological record and that these develop sporadically from 160,000 years bp in association with evidence for their consequences in terms of technological innovations, improved efficiency in technological and natural spheres and innovative thinking. Whilst other explanations for the emergence Of modern human behaviour may also contribute to observed changes, it is argued that the incorporation of cognitive differences played a significant role in the technological, social and symbolic expression of 'modern' behaviour

What is Same but Different and why does it matter?

A detailed outline of the Same but Different Desert Art forums held in Alice Springs in 2012 and 2013, and an introduction to the essays, interviews, films and images that make up the 'Same but Different' section of this issue of CSR

Context-Aware Zero-Shot Recognition

We present a novel problem setting in zero-shot learning, zero-shot object recognition and detection in the context. Contrary to the traditional zero-shot learning methods, which simply infers unseen categories by transferring knowledge from the objects belonging to semantically similar seen categories, we aim to understand the identity of the novel objects in an image surrounded by the known objects using the inter-object relation prior. Specifically, we leverage the visual context and the geometric relationships between all pairs of objects in a single image, and capture the information useful to infer unseen categories. We integrate our context-aware zero-shot learning framework into the traditional zero-shot learning techniques seamlessly using a Conditional Random Field (CRF). The proposed algorithm is evaluated on both zero-shot region classification and zero-shot detection tasks. The results on Visual Genome (VG) dataset show that our model significantly boosts performance with the additional visual context compared to traditional methods