Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

Designing library tools: the (un)importance of employee involvement

The growing trend of public institutions to open up data and information to citizens encouraged archives and libraries to enhance the disclosure of their content towards end-users. This implies technical challenges as more and more information is exchanged not only between people, but also between different databases and applications which are consulted by different user groups through different devices and entry points. For libraries, the challenge lies in constructing a properly functioning catalogue which is able to combine a huge amount of information from various sources and is consultable by a large group of end-users in a user friendly manner. Based on the User Centred Design paradigm and Kaulio’s (1998) degrees of user involvement in innovation, this paper wants to consider whether involving users during the creation of metadata tools can result in more motivated library co-workers and a more appreciated tool and (hopefully) in a permanent tagging tool

User-centered development of a Virtual Research Environment to support collaborative research events

This paper discusses the user-centred development process within the Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW) project, funded under the JISC Virtual Research Environments (VRE) programme. After presenting the project, its aims and the functionality of the CREW VRE, we focus on the user engagement approach, grounded in the method of co-realisation. We describe the different research settings and requirements of our three embedded user groups and the respective activities conducted so far. Finally we elaborate on the main challenges of our user engagement approach and end with the project’s next steps

Getting it Right: Lessons Learned in Applying a Critical Artefact Approach

“Critical artefacts”, the products of critical design (Dunne 1999), prompt reflection rather than satisfy obvious user needs. The author is developing an instrumental use of critical artefacts as part of a human-centred design process. Earlier work showed the effectiveness of this approach in allowing stakeholders to engage with novel product ideas. This paper describes a project, Living Rooms, developing the approach with a broader group of stakeholders and devising the critical artefacts with other designers. Although providing insights into the design context (Bowen & Chamberlain 2008), this application of the approach was less productive than in earlier projects and suggested factors that could affect its efficacy. Implications for future applications of the approach are noted: the type of contexts it is appropriate for; the characteristics of effective stakeholder participants and the need to educate them in the context and enable them to think imaginatively. Von Hippel’s ‘lead users’ (1986, 1988) could provide a framework for selecting stakeholders likely to engage effectively with critical artefacts. The second part of the paper summarises lead user theory and discusses how the two characteristics of lead users, motivation and capability (Luthje & Herstatt 2004), tend to make them suitable participants for the critical artefact approach. A second project, Digital Mementos, is described – in particular how lead-user-based selection and the above implications have been applied. The paper concludes by reviewing the progress in developing generalisable methods exploiting the critical artefact approach, noting the need to position the approach within wider design activity and points toward future work relating it to the entire product design process. Keywords: Critical Design; Human-Centred Design; Innovation; Design Methodology</p

Usability Engineering and PPGIS - Towards a Learning-improving Cycle

July 21 - 2

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

Why not empower knowledge workers and lifelong learners to develop their own environments?

In industrial and educational practice, learning environments are designed and implemented by experts from many different fields, reaching from traditional software development and product management to pedagogy and didactics. Workplace and lifelong learning, however, implicate that learners are more self-motivated, capable, and self-confident in achieving their goals and, consequently, tempt to consider that certain development tasks can be shifted to end-users in order to facilitate a more flexible, open, and responsive learning environment. With respect to streams like end-user development and opportunistic design, this paper elaborates a methodology for user-driven environment design for action-based activities. Based on a former research approach named 'Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments'(MUPPLE) we demonstrate how workplace and lifelong learners can be empowered to develop their own environment for collaborating in learner networks and which prerequisites and support facilities are necessary for this methodology

Behaviour change at work: Empowering energy efficiency in the workplace through user-centred design

Copyright @ 2011 University of California eScholarship RepositoryCO2 emissions from non-domestic buildings - primarily workplaces - make up 18 percent of the UK's carbon footprint. A combination of technology advances and behavioural changes have the potential to make significant impact, but interventions have often been planned in ways which do not take into account the needs, levels of understanding and everyday behavioural contexts of building users - and hence do not achieve the hoped-for success.This paper provides a brief introduction to the Empower project, a current industrial-academic collaboration in the UK which is applying methods from user-centred design practice to understand diverse users' needs, priorities, mental models of energy and decision-making heuristics - as well as the affordances available to them - in a number of office buildings. We are developing and trialling a set of low-cost, simple software interventions tailored to multiple user groups with different degrees of agency over their energy use, which seek to influence more energy efficient behaviour at work in areas such as HVAC, lighting and equipment use. The project comprises an ethnographic research phase, a participatory design programme involving building users in the design of interventions, and iterative trials in a large office building in central London

Personalised Learning: Developing a Vygotskian Framework for E-learning

Personalisation has emerged as a central feature of recent educational strategies in the UK and abroad. At the heart of this is a vision to empower learners to take more ownership of their learning and develop autonomy. While the introduction of digital technologies is not enough to effect this change, embedding the affordances of new technologies is expected to offer new routes for creating personalised learning environments. The approach is not unique to education, with consumer technologies offering a 'personalised' relationship which is both engaging and dynamic, however the challenge remains for learning providers to capture and transpose this to educational contexts. As learners begin to utilise a range of tools to pursue communicative and collaborative actions, the first part of this paper will use analysis of activity logs to uncover interesting trends for maturing e-learning platforms across over 100 UK learning providers. While personalisation appeals to marketing theories this paper will argue that if learning is to become personalised one must ask what the optimal instruction for any particular learner is? For Vygotsky this is based in the zone of proximal development, a way of understanding the causal-dynamics of development that allow appropriate pedagogical interventions. The second part of this paper will interpret personalised learning as the organising principle for a sense-making framework for e-learning. In this approach personalised learning provides the context for assessing the capabilities of e-learning using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development as the framework for assessing learner potential and development