Entanglements of creative agency and digital technology : a sociomaterial study of computer game development

Digital technology, with its distinctive characteristics that result from the fundamental process of digitalization that underpins it, is seen as fundamentally altering processes of creativity. However, we currently have limited understanding of creativity in relation to the development of digital technology. Computer game development, with its combination of esthetic, affective and cultural use features and highly sophisticated digital technologies, is a valuable setting for investigating these issues. In this paper, we explore how computer games are shaped through the interplay between the creative intentions of developers and the digital technologies involved in their production and playing. Drawing on in-depth studies conducted at three leading computer game development studios and a leading producer of the software system used in game development, this paper shows how the game developers' creative ideas for imagined novel game-playing experiences relate to a) the development of relevant digital technologies, and b) the emergence of new game development practices. The article goes on to propose a view of creativity as an on-going flow that, following an initial ‘creative impulse’, ripples through the sociomaterial entanglements of a particular setting, reconfiguring them in the process and spreading out in time and space in often unexpected ways

Traceability support in software product lines

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.Traceability is becoming a necessary quality of any modern software system. The complexity in modern systems is such that, if we cannot rely on good techniques and tools it becomes an unsustainable burden, where software artifacts can hardly be linked to their initial requirements. Modern software systems are composed by a many artifacts (models, code, etc.). Any change in one of them may have repercussions on many components. The assessment of this impact usually comes at a high cost and is highly error-prone. This complexity inherent to software development increases when it comes to Software Product Line Engineering. Traceability aims to respond to this challenge, by linking all the software artifacts that are used, in order to reason about how they influence each others. We propose to specify, design and implement an extensible Traceability Framework that will allow developers to provide traceability for a product line, or the possibility to extend it for other development scenarios. This MSc thesis work is to develop an extensible framework, using Model-Driven techniques and technologies, to provide traceability support for product lines. We also wish to provide basic and advanced traceability queries, and traceability views designed for the needs of each user

The User Experience of Participation: Tracing the Intersection of Sociotechnical Design and Cultural Practice in Digital Ecosystems

In this dissertation, I combine methods from Technical Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, and User Experience Design to trace the social and creative practices of social web participants. Using actor network theory, I explore the concept of participation as social and creative practice that demands coordinative knowledge work enacted within a cultural space. Leveraging the insight gained from this research, I develop the user experience of participation as a research and design methodology that privileges the movement of people and information in order to structure and re-structure social connections. I explore this methodology through three intersections between people and technology. The first is between the practices of digital participants within online cultures and the policies aimed at regulating their social and creative work. Second, participation is defined in the ways that local exigency of participants intersects with the implementation of regulations and policies through technological design. Finally, a third intersection appears when participants work to restructure their relationships to policies and technologies through coordinative knowledge work that uncovers and links information within digital ecosystems

A LAYERED FRAMEWORK FOR SURGICAL SIMULATION DEVELOPMENT

The field of surgical simulation is still in its infancy, and a number of projects are attempting to take the next step towards becoming the de facto standard for surgical simulation development, an ambition shared by the framework described here. Dubbed AutoMan, this framework has four main goals: a) to provide a common interface to simulation subsystems, b) allow the replacement of these underlying technologies, c) encourage collaboration between independent research projects and, d) expand the on targeted user base of similar frameworks. AutoMan\u27s layered structure provides an abstraction from implementation details providing the common user interface. Being highly modular and built on SOFA, the framework is highly extensible allowing algorithms and modules to be replaced or modified easily. This extensibility encourages collaboration as newly developed modules can be incorporated allowing the framework itself to grow and evolve with the industry. Also, making the programming interface easy to use caters to casual developers who are likely to add functionality to the system