Geographic Citizen Science Design: No one left behind

Little did Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and other ‘gentlemen scientists’ know, when they were making their scientific discoveries, that some centuries later they would inspire a new field of scientific practice and innovation, called citizen science. The current growth and availability of citizen science projects and relevant applications to support citizen involvement is massive; every citizen has an opportunity to become a scientist and contribute to a scientific discipline, without having any professional qualifications. With geographic interfaces being the common approach to support collection, analysis and dissemination of data contributed by participants, ‘geographic citizen science’ is being approached from different angles. Geographic Citizen Science Design takes an anthropological and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) stance to provide the theoretical and methodological foundations to support the design, development and evaluation of citizen science projects and their user-friendly applications. Through a careful selection of case studies in the urban and non-urban contexts of the Global North and South, the chapters provide insights into the design and interaction barriers, as well as on the lessons learned from the engagement of a diverse set of participants; for example, literate and non-literate people with a range of technical skills, and with different cultural backgrounds. Looking at the field through the lenses of specific case studies, the book captures the current state of the art in research and development of geographic citizen science and provides critical insight to inform technological innovation and future research in this area

Geographic Citizen Science Design

Little did Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and other ‘gentlemen scientists’ know, when they were making their scientific discoveries, that some centuries later they would inspire a new field of scientific practice and innovation, called citizen science. The current growth and availability of citizen science projects and relevant applications to support citizen involvement is massive; every citizen has an opportunity to become a scientist and contribute to a scientific discipline, without having any professional qualifications. With geographic interfaces being the common approach to support collection, analysis and dissemination of data contributed by participants, ‘geographic citizen science’ is being approached from different angles. Geographic Citizen Science Design takes an anthropological and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) stance to provide the theoretical and methodological foundations to support the design, development and evaluation of citizen science projects and their user-friendly applications. Through a careful selection of case studies in the urban and non-urban contexts of the Global North and South, the chapters provide insights into the design and interaction barriers, as well as on the lessons learned from the engagement of a diverse set of participants; for example, literate and non-literate people with a range of technical skills, and with different cultural backgrounds. Looking at the field through the lenses of specific case studies, the book captures the current state of the art in research and development of geographic citizen science and provides critical insight to inform technological innovation and future research in this area

Enabling Collaborative Visual Analysis across Heterogeneous Devices

We are surrounded by novel device technologies emerging at an unprecedented pace. These devices are heterogeneous in nature: in large and small sizes with many input and sensing mechanisms. When many such devices are used by multiple users with a shared goal, they form a heterogeneous device ecosystem. A device ecosystem has great potential in data science to act as a natural medium for multiple analysts to make sense of data using visualization. It is essential as today's big data problems require more than a single mind or a single machine to solve them. Towards this vision, I introduce the concept of collaborative, cross-device visual analytics (C2-VA) and outline a reference model to develop user interfaces for C2-VA. This dissertation covers interaction models, coordination techniques, and software platforms to enable full stack support for C2-VA. Firstly, we connected devices to form an ecosystem using software primitives introduced in the early frameworks from this dissertation. To work in a device ecosystem, we designed multi-user interaction for visual analysis in front of large displays by finding a balance between proxemics and mid-air gestures. Extending these techniques, we considered the roles of different devices–large and small–to present a conceptual framework for utilizing multiple devices for visual analytics. When applying this framework, findings from a user study showcase flexibility in the analytic workflow and potential for generation of complex insights in device ecosystems. Beyond this, we supported coordination between multiple users in a device ecosystem by depicting the presence, attention, and data coverage of each analyst within a group. Building on these parts of the C2-VA stack, the culmination of this dissertation is a platform called Vistrates. This platform introduces a component model for modular creation of user interfaces that work across multiple devices and users. A component is an analytical primitive–a data processing method, a visualization, or an interaction technique–that is reusable, composable, and extensible. Together, components can support a complex analytical activity. On top of the component model, the support for collaboration and device ecosystems comes for granted in Vistrates. Overall, this enables the exploration of new research ideas within C2-VA

Geographic Citizen Science Design

Little did Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and other ‘gentlemen scientists’ know, when they were making their scientific discoveries, that some centuries later they would inspire a new field of scientific practice and innovation, called citizen science. The current growth and availability of citizen science projects and relevant applications to support citizen involvement is massive; every citizen has an opportunity to become a scientist and contribute to a scientific discipline, without having any professional qualifications. With geographic interfaces being the common approach to support collection, analysis and dissemination of data contributed by participants, ‘geographic citizen science’ is being approached from different angles. Geographic Citizen Science Design takes an anthropological and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) stance to provide the theoretical and methodological foundations to support the design, development and evaluation of citizen science projects and their user-friendly applications. Through a careful selection of case studies in the urban and non-urban contexts of the Global North and South, the chapters provide insights into the design and interaction barriers, as well as on the lessons learned from the engagement of a diverse set of participants; for example, literate and non-literate people with a range of technical skills, and with different cultural backgrounds. Looking at the field through the lenses of specific case studies, the book captures the current state of the art in research and development of geographic citizen science and provides critical insight to inform technological innovation and future research in this area

Designing Effective Interfaces for Older Users

The thesis examines the factors that need to be considered in order to undertake successful design of user interfaces for older users. The literature on aging is surveyed for age related changes that are of relevance to interface design. The findings from the literature review are extended and placed in a human context using observational studies of older people and their supporters as these older people attempted to learn about and use computers. These findings are then applied in three case studies of interface design and product development for older users. These case studies are reported and examined in depth. For each case study results are presented on the acceptance of the final product by older people. These results show that, for each case study, the interfaces used led to products that the older people evaluating them rated as unusually suitable to their needs as older users. The relationship between the case studies and the overall research aims is then examined in a discussion of the research methodology. In the case studies there is an evolving approach used in developing the interface designs. This approach includes intensive contribution by older people to the shaping of the interface design. This approach is analyzed and is presented as an approach to designing user interfaces for older people. It was found that a number of non-standard techniques were useful in order to maximize the benefit from the involvement of the older contributors and to ensure their ethical treatment. These techniques and the rationale behind them are described. Finally the interface design approach that emerged has strong links to the approach used by the UTOPIA team based at the university of Dundee. The extent to which the thesis provides support for the UTOPIA approach is discussed

Enhancement of the usability of SOA services for novice users

Recently, the automation of service integration has provided a significant advantage in delivering services to novice users. This art of integrating various services is known as Service Composition and its main purpose is to simplify the development process for web applications and facilitates reuse of services. It is one of the paradigms that enables services to end-users (i.e.service provisioning) through the outsourcing of web contents and it requires users to share and reuse services in more collaborative ways. Most service composers are effective at enabling integration of web contents, but they do not enable universal access across different groups of users. This is because, the currently existing content aggregators require complex interactions in order to create web applications (e.g., Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)) as a result not all users are able to use such web tools. This trend demands changes in the web tools that end-users use to gain and share information, hence this research uses Mashups as a service composition technique to allow novice users to integrate publicly available Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services, where there is a minimal active web application development. Mashups being the platforms that integrate disparate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create user defined web applications; presents a great opportunity for service provisioning. However, their usability for novice users remains invalidated since Mashup tools are not easy to use they require basic programming skills which makes the process of designing and creating Mashups difficult. This is because Mashup tools access heterogeneous web contents using public web APIs and the process of integrating them become complex since web APIs are tailored by different vendors. Moreover, the design of Mashup editors is unnecessary complex; as a result, users do not know where to start when creating Mashups. This research address the gap between Mashup tools and usability by the designing and implementing a semantically enriched Mashup tool to discover, annotate and compose APIs to improve the utilization of SOA services by novice users. The researchers conducted an analysis of the already existing Mashup tools to identify challenges and weaknesses experienced by novice Mashup users. The findings from the requirement analysis formulated the system usability requirements that informed the design and implementation of the proposed Mashup tool. The proposed architecture addressed three layers: composition, annotation and discovery. The researchers developed a simple Mashup tool referred to as soa-Services Provisioner (SerPro) that allowed novice users to create web application flexibly. Its usability and effectiveness was validated. The proposed Mashup tool enhanced the usability of SOA services, since data analysis and results showed that it was usable to novice users by scoring a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 72.08. Furthermore, this research discusses the research limitations and future work for further improvements

Designing technology for young children: guidelines grounded in a literature investigation on child development and children's technology

This thesis is about the design of technology for children from five to eight years of age. The majority of available guidelines and principles for design or evaluation of technology support the design of products aimed at adults. The limited guidelines available for design of young children's technology do not focus sufficiently on age-related requirements or they offer high-level advice that is only useful in the planning stages of design. Working from the assumption that knowledge available in the literature provides sufficient information to support this process, my aim with this study was to demonstrate how a dependable and useful set of guidelines for the design of technology for children aged five to eight years could be derived from an existing body of knowledge. Development of the guidelines firstly involved research into the psychological theories of children's development to identify those elements of development and the characteristics of children that may have bearing on children's use of technology. Secondly, the literature on children's development of specific skills such as literacy and mathematics was investigated. The available literature on young children's use of technology was studied next and, finally, the applicability of existing design guidelines and principles for children's products evaluated. Throughout this literature investigation the researcher gathered design-relevant factors that could potentially become design guidelines. Using qualitative data analysis techniques, more than five hundred such data elements were systematically coded, processed, analysed and categorised. The result is three hundred and fifty guidelines organised into a framework of six categories and twenty-six subcategories that integrates the relevant theoretical fields and provides practical support for designers. To demonstrate the credibility and usefulness of the emerging guidelines they were used to do an evaluation and re-design of an existing product aimed at the target group. The thesis reports in detail on the different stages of the research, and systematically takes the reader through the process of deriving guidelines from existing theory and research findings, and integrating them into a useful framework.School of ComputingPhD. (Computer Science