Include 2011 : The role of inclusive design in making social innovation happen.

Include is the biennial conference held at the RCA and hosted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The event is directed by Jo-Anne Bichard and attracts an international delegation

Immersive Technologies in Virtual Companions: A Systematic Literature Review

The emergence of virtual companions is transforming the evolution of intelligent systems that effortlessly cater to the unique requirements of users. These advanced systems not only take into account the user present capabilities, preferences, and needs but also possess the capability to adapt dynamically to changes in the environment, as well as fluctuations in the users emotional state or behavior. A virtual companion is an intelligent software or application that offers support, assistance, and companionship across various aspects of users lives. Various enabling technologies are involved in building virtual companion, among these, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) are emerging as transformative tools. While their potential for use in virtual companions or digital assistants is promising, their applications in these domains remain relatively unexplored. To address this gap, a systematic review was conducted to investigate the applications of VR, AR, and MR immersive technologies in the development of virtual companions. A comprehensive search across PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar yielded 28 relevant articles out of a pool of 644. The review revealed that immersive technologies, particularly VR and AR, play a significant role in creating digital assistants, offering a wide range of applications that brings various facilities in the individuals life in areas such as addressing social isolation, enhancing cognitive abilities and dementia care, facilitating education, and more. Additionally, AR and MR hold potential for enhancing Quality of life (QoL) within the context of virtual companion technology. The findings of this review provide a valuable foundation for further research in this evolving field

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

THE EFFECTS OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND AFFECTIVE DESIGN PRINCIPLES ON THE ADOPTION OF M-HEALTH APPLICATIONS

Published ThesisPrevious research has found that M-Health initiatives have not been adopted and used effectively in many cases, especially in rural communal locations. Based on this, the researcher has surmised that factors contributing to the non-use of such initiative could be the resulted of a lack of knowledge with regard to the use of technology, literacy challenges, possible fear of technology and a lack of information regarding interventions that have the potential to improve quality of life. Consequently, an initiative that has usability as its core function may play a critical role in the use and adoption of such technologies. The researcher wondered if and how anthropomorphic and affective design principles which aspire to extract an emotional or positively reinforced sub-conscious reaction from users may influence the adoption and use of M-Health initiatives when applied to said interventions. This study therefore set out to investigate the effects of anthropomorphism and affective design principles on the adoption of M-Health applications, with the Sethakeng rural community in the Northern Cape province of South Africa research population after consent was obtained from the relevant community leaders. The researcher wanted first to ascertain whether anthropomorphism and affective design could influence the adoption of Mobile-Health applications, then to identify which was the more effective method to design Mobile-Health applications and finally, to provide guidelines and recommendations about the most effective design theory, as identified in the study, when designing applications. This study predominantly employed a mixed approach research methodology which included action research cycles and quantitative data in the form of usage statistics, obtained from CloudWare, in the final report. A case study was conducted in a rural South African setting to explore and eventually understand the relation between the case community and the intervention. A qualitative research design best allowed the researcher to get a better understanding of the research problem identified and the obstacles facing the relevant rural community and quantitative data assisted with better understanding the relevant usage trends in terms of the M-Health intervention. The objectives of the case study were to observe the phenomenon and describe it with regards to the case community, document the reactions of the case community to different instances and variations of the phenomenon and, lastly, to report on the design principle that yielded the most positive reaction from the community from a usage perspective; thereby indicating the adoption of the design methodology employed. The research contributed towards the successful development, placement and scrutiny of two emotion-driven interfaces for the same M-Health intervention. A distinctive perspective was provided with regard to affective and anthropomorphic design to identify the better design model for improved application acceptance in a rural community context. At the conclusion of the study, evidence suggested that community members found the anthropomorphic interface design superior. The researcher was thus able to explore, identify, develop and list a set of guidelines that can be used in the area of emotional design. Each guideline was based on what worked in practice and was applied successfully throughout this study. The researcher would like these guidelines be implemented and utilised by other designers in the field of interaction design for future designers

Live-Art: A Business Plan of a Start-up for Art Education and Art Collection

Live-Art is a start-up venture in New York City that combines online and offline art experiences, which blurs the boundaries between art education and art collection and organically integrates the two fields. Our philosophy is to inspire people to live with art and create their own art kingdom. By strengthening each individual’s engagement in the art world, we aim to improve our users’ art appreciation perception through art education and to encourage them to create an aesthetic atmosphere for their living environment through art collection. Traditionally, education is more focused on non-profit, while art collection is more on commercialized consumption. However, they are deeply connected and intertwined. From this, we hope that our digital learning on art education can guide users to generate passion for the art collection and correspondingly allow more art collectors to participate in art education programs to deepen aesthetic experiences. The company’s business mainly includes online digital products - the mobile application, and in-person art appreciation events as well as the art advisory service. We expect to build up a digital learning and interactive art collection community, aiming to accumulate more accurate target art collectors from the virtual platforms to the real-world art business. Our target user market is Chinese people living and working in New York City since New York has a natural artistic and cultural atmosphere where people have a greater demand for high-quality life with aesthetic experience. Our unique advantage lies in creating an efficient, flexible, hybrid, and social art learning experience. At present, most mobile applications in the American market detach art education, museum guide, and art collection features, setting a clear barrier between logical tools and emotional experiences. However, we both value digital user experience and aesthetic engagement in the real world, providing our users with a novel and effective learning and art-collecting experience. Users can learn, interact, find friends, and sign up to participate in art events on our digital platform, linking great activities between the real and virtual worlds. To create better content, we have an excellent team with many talents from various professional fields, including product development, art education, curriculum design, and art collection. All of our art events and art-related courses have solid academic and theoretical foundations. The collaboration of these elites will continuously improve our venture to optimize the problems from our customer feedback or of the same type of products in the market. Our pricing strategy is more economical than many museum membership plans in New York City, and the registration system for it is very flexible, allowing users to engage in or drop out anytime. In the initial stage of the company, our main capital came from the entrepreneurial partners, and we increased our income through the art activities carried out successively. Although project development will cost a lot of funding, the company estimates a first-year revenue of $800,000 and expects to be profitable after the first eight months of operations. Under the ideal conditions we predict, the company can start to achieve stable profits in the third year, increasingly expand the number of users, and form a strong social influence in the art market in New York City

Systems success measurement: instrument & framework a new perspective

There are major concerns regarding the previous research that can be said as having poor measurements, lack of theoretical grounding, and concern heavily on investment justifies. Some are also considered as having weak survey instruments, inappropriate data collection approaches, and lack of agreement on the dependent variables measurement that resulted in its incompatibility. Several related issues pertaining to high rates of systems’ failure that justify the heavy investment costs and affect the systems’ success of measurement. This matter had raised a high concern, especially for the researchers, practitioners, organization managers and systems administrators. Thus, the successful measurement of any systems is vital. The purpose of this study is to provide a framework and a high-quality validated instrument based on the literature review and experts’ validation. Subsequently, it can be used in the future studies to efficiently assist in the systems’ success measurement. The statistical test of 344 users with the smart PLS for the instrument shows an excellent result