The role of object in service design

For successful service design, how to utilize users’ insight, knowledge and experiences are core factor to consider. How to facilitate the users’ value creation by providing and delivering resources and processes through interactions between service and user is also another key factor. Designers focus on designing the interactions- touchpoints/evidences- as important part of their work. Through the service design processes of exploration and creation, the designers design a physical-, visual- or virtual- object to facilitate users’ service experience. However, the research of the designed object is limited only on their importance or a certain case. This study seeks different roles of the designed object in service design through case studies, which collected from three years of TOUCHPOINT- service design journals. Thematic analysis and affinity diagram tool were conducted to analyze collected data and categorize found different roles. The study addresses five roles of the object: Empowering, Emotion, Enriching, Education, Enhanc-ing. Designed objects empower users and their rights, deliver certain emotion or solve emotional problems, enrich users’ lives by providing opportunities for users to interact others, deliver knowledge and share information and provide communication channels, and finally enhance service performance. Furthermore an object sometimes takes multiples roles or changes its role to another. Designers bodily know how to utilize unique feature of the object in designing services. Some of objects enable co-creation and on-going service changes. The object and service element supports each other. The study suggests that understanding the role of object in service design reinforces ser-vice designers’ competence in shaping users’ service experience

E-learning and Digital Training in Healthcare Education

This book is dedicated to the current trends and new challenges that have emerged from the new e-learning environment, focusing on its potential to revolutionize Healthcare Education and exploring how it may help to better prepare future healthcare professionals for their daily practice. “E-learning and Digital Training in Healthcare Education: Current Trends and New Challenges” contains several research articles focused on new insights into the use of interactive and intuitive e-learning tools and innovative teaching methodologies that engage healthcare students in the new web-based environment training. It also includes several case studies of ‘pathfinder’ e-learning initiatives and surveys related to the penetration and acceptance of digital training in Healthcare Education

The virtual participant : story telling in a computer supported collaborative learning environment

This thesis presents a study of a novel approach for supporting students in text based electronic conferencing. It describes the development of a concept known as the Virtual Participant. An initial prototype was developed which was tested on the Open University Business School MBA course on Creative Management. The Virtual Participant first presented itself to the users as Uncle Bulgaria. a metaphor for collecting and recycling important information. The Virtual Participant approach is to store the discussions students have had in previous years that the course has run. and to retrieve those discussions at a time most appropriate to helping the students studying this year. It was never intended to provide 'the answer' but rather examples of similar discussions on similar topics. Uncle Bulgaria interacted with the students over a period of 16 weeks. during which time the students prepared two assignments and completed the first half of the course. The information gained from the students' interactions with the system and their feedback to a questionnaire survey was then fed back into a second prototype' which was again tested on the same course. In the second study the system was known to the students as the Active Archive. an active component of an archive of past student discussions. Through cross year comparisons it was possible to evaluate the improvements made between the Active Archive and Uncle Bulgaria systems. The Active Archive interacted with the students on a much larger scale than Uncle Bulgaria had. but with no increased negative impact. The second study provided examples where the Active Archive stimulated discussion amongst the students and vicarious learning could be said to have taken place. Taking the lessons learned from these two studies a number of guidelines for the development of such systems have been produced and are described and discussed

Visual Analytics for the Exploratory Analysis and Labeling of Cultural Data

Cultural data can come in various forms and modalities, such as text traditions, artworks, music, crafted objects, or even as intangible heritage such as biographies of people, performing arts, cultural customs and rites. The assignment of metadata to such cultural heritage objects is an important task that people working in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) do on a daily basis. These rich metadata collections are used to categorize, structure, and study collections, but can also be used to apply computational methods. Such computational methods are in the focus of Computational and Digital Humanities projects and research. For the longest time, the digital humanities community has focused on textual corpora, including text mining, and other natural language processing techniques. Although some disciplines of the humanities, such as art history and archaeology have a long history of using visualizations. In recent years, the digital humanities community has started to shift the focus to include other modalities, such as audio-visual data. In turn, methods in machine learning and computer vision have been proposed for the specificities of such corpora. Over the last decade, the visualization community has engaged in several collaborations with the digital humanities, often with a focus on exploratory or comparative analysis of the data at hand. This includes both methods and systems that support classical Close Reading of the material and Distant Reading methods that give an overview of larger collections, as well as methods in between, such as Meso Reading. Furthermore, a wider application of machine learning methods can be observed on cultural heritage collections. But they are rarely applied together with visualizations to allow for further perspectives on the collections in a visual analytics or human-in-the-loop setting. Visual analytics can help in the decision-making process by guiding domain experts through the collection of interest. However, state-of-the-art supervised machine learning methods are often not applicable to the collection of interest due to missing ground truth. One form of ground truth are class labels, e.g., of entities depicted in an image collection, assigned to the individual images. Labeling all objects in a collection is an arduous task when performed manually, because cultural heritage collections contain a wide variety of different objects with plenty of details. A problem that arises with these collections curated in different institutions is that not always a specific standard is followed, so the vocabulary used can drift apart from another, making it difficult to combine the data from these institutions for large-scale analysis. This thesis presents a series of projects that combine machine learning methods with interactive visualizations for the exploratory analysis and labeling of cultural data. First, we define cultural data with regard to heritage and contemporary data, then we look at the state-of-the-art of existing visualization, computer vision, and visual analytics methods and projects focusing on cultural data collections. After this, we present the problems addressed in this thesis and their solutions, starting with a series of visualizations to explore different facets of rap lyrics and rap artists with a focus on text reuse. Next, we engage in a more complex case of text reuse, the collation of medieval vernacular text editions. For this, a human-in-the-loop process is presented that applies word embeddings and interactive visualizations to perform textual alignments on under-resourced languages supported by labeling of the relations between lines and the relations between words. We then switch the focus from textual data to another modality of cultural data by presenting a Virtual Museum that combines interactive visualizations and computer vision in order to explore a collection of artworks. With the lessons learned from the previous projects, we engage in the labeling and analysis of medieval illuminated manuscripts and so combine some of the machine learning methods and visualizations that were used for textual data with computer vision methods. Finally, we give reflections on the interdisciplinary projects and the lessons learned, before we discuss existing challenges when working with cultural heritage data from the computer science perspective to outline potential research directions for machine learning and visual analytics of cultural heritage data

From the Ground Up: Designerly Knowledge in Human-Drone Interaction

There are flying robots out there — you may have seen and heard them, droning over your head. Drones have expanded our human capacities, lifting our sight to the skies, but not without generating intricate experiences. How are these machines being designed and researched? What design methods, approaches, and philosophies are relevant to the study of the development (or decline) of drones in society? In this thesis, I argue that we must re-frame how drones are studied, from the ground up, through a design stance. I invite you to take a journey with me, with changing lenses from the work of others to my own intimate relationship with this technology. My work relies on exploring the fringes of design research: understudied groups such as children, alternative design approaches such as soma design, and peripheral methods such as autoethnography.This thesis includes four articles discussing perspectives on designerly knowledge, composing a frame surrounding the notion that we may be missing out on some of the aspects of the wicked nature of human-drone interaction (HDI) design. The methods are poised on phenomenology and narratives, and supported by the assumption that any subject of study is a sociotechnical assemblage. Starting through a first-person perspective, I offer a contribution to the gap in research through a longitudinal autoethnographic study conducted with my children. The second paper comes in the form of a pictorial expressing a first-person experience during a design research workshop, and what that meant for my relationship with drones as a research material. The third paper leaps into a Research through Design project, challenging the solutionist drone and offering instead the first steps in a concept-driven design of the unlikely pairing of drones and breathing. The fourth paper returns to the pictorial form, suggesting a method for visual conversations between researchers through the tangible qualities of sketches and illustrations. Central to this thesis, is the argument for designerly approaches in HDI and championing the need for alternative forms of publication and research. To that end, I include two publications in the form of pictorials: a publication format relying on visual knowledge and with growing interest in the HCI community

Employability & Competences

The book is the final report of the researches, discussions, conversations around and about the Project PRIN Employability & Competences which took place on March 9th-­‐11th, 2017 within an International Conference at the University of Florence. It was the final event of the project PRIN2012LATR9N which aims were: «to design innovative programs for higher education, to promote personalized and learner-centered teaching and learning, to build on job competencies, to value talents to create new work opportunities, to support young adults during their employment emergency, as a response to socio economic crisis and as a citizenship action». The research activities concerned the main phases of the students’ academic life: career guidance upon entry, personalized teaching, career calling, professional vocation, profession building activities such as internships and work related experiences, and lastly job placement

Visual approaches to knowledge organization and contextual exploration

This thesis explores possible visual approaches for the representation of semantic structures, such as zz-structures. Some holistic visual representations of complex domains have been investigated through the proposal of new views - the so-called zz-views - that allow both to make visible the interconnections between elements and to support a contextual and multilevel exploration of knowledge. The potential of this approach has been examined in the context of two case studies that have led to the creation of two Web applications. The \ufb01rst domain of study regarded the visual representation, analysis and management of scienti\ufb01c bibliographies. In this context, we modeled a Web application, we called VisualBib, to support researchers in building, re\ufb01ning, analyzing and sharing bibliographies. We adopted a multi-faceted approach integrating features that are typical of three di\ufb00erent classes of tools: bibliography visual analysis systems, bibliographic citation indexes and personal research assistants. The evaluation studies carried out on a \ufb01rst prototype highlighted the positive impact of our visual model and encouraged us to improve it and develop further visual analysis features we incorporated in the version 3.0 of the application. The second case study concerned the modeling and development of a multimedia catalog of Web and mobile applications. The objective was to provide an overview of a significant number of tools that can help teachers in the implementation of active learning approaches supported by technology and in the design of Teaching and Learning Activities (TLAs). We analyzed and documented 281 applications, preparing for each of them a detailed multilingual card and a video-presentation, organizing all the material in an original purpose-based taxonomy, visually represented through a browsable holistic view. The catalog, we called AppInventory, provides contextual exploration mechanisms based on zz-structures, collects user contributions and evaluations about the apps and o\ufb00ers visual analysis tools for the comparison of the applications data and user evaluations. The results of two user studies carried out on groups of teachers and students shown a very positive impact of our proposal in term of graphical layout, semantic structure, navigation mechanisms and usability, also in comparison with two similar catalogs

Knowledge on the Move: Studies on Mobile Social Education

This book draws on work undertaken by colleagues involved with the Erasmus+ project called SoMoveED, or Social Education on the Move. The broader aim of the project is to develop, implement, and disseminate innovation in the form of a model of mobile social education in higher education, of which this book makes up one small part.The project draws together institutions and organizations from ten European countries (Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Turkey, and the United Kingdom), including eight universities, two non-governmental organizations and one social enterprise. Approximately 40 people are working on the project, including academic teachers and researchers, entrepreneurs, and social activists. The project’s main objective is to explore and develop ways in which the teaching process can be organized in motion, outside the university walls, with the participation of stakeholders from outside the academic community (citizens, representatives of institutions and organizations, activists, people at risk of marginalization). This model incorporates three important features into the educational process: (1) mobility; (2) participation; and (3) inclusion

Data Musicalization

Data musicalization is the process of automatically composing music based on given data, as an approach to perceptualizing information artistically. The aim of data musicalization is to evoke subjective experiences in relation to the information, rather than merely to convey unemotional information objectively. This paper is written as a tutorial for readers interested in data musicalization. We start by providing a systematic characterization of musicalization approaches, based on their inputs, methods and outputs. We then illustrate data musicalization techniques with examples from several applications: one that perceptualizes physical sleep data as music, several that artistically compose music inspired by the sleep data, one that musicalizes on-line chat conversations to provide a perceptualization of liveliness of a discussion, and one that uses musicalization in a game-like mobile application that allows its users to produce music. We additionally provide a number of electronic samples of music produced by the different musicalization applications.Peer reviewe

Action Research of Cyclonic Transactions in Online Management Education

The aim of the research was to generate a cyclonic model for understanding the influences and processes of continuously improving management education in an environment rich in online learning technologies. The research questions were: 1. What is the nature of the cyclonic interactions observed in the transactions of a team of online management educators? 2. How might an understanding of cyclonic interactions, a. help refine action research, and, b. generate rich insight for online management education? The methodology was an action research project. The research team worked in an online Master of Business Administration (MBA) to continuously develop teaching practice in one unit of the MBA. The methodology matched the objectives of the project, and the appropriate rigour associated with qualitative, interpretive research. The results showed that theories of systems and relational dynamics, adapted to hermeneutics and aligned with other learning theories, can be framed by the metaphor of a cyclone to conduct research into teaching practice and build upon the theory base in the field of online education. Online management education is subject to reinterpretations. The cyclonic framework explains some of the changes. The project showed that a chaotic but organised cyclonic program development process in one particular MBA course was informative for and informed by the chaotic and cyclonic globalized business world. For the education of managers the cyclonic view was relevant. The approach was metaphorical and, therefore, opened new ways of seeing and speaking. Findings pertained to the nature of the cyclonic interactions, how an understanding of cyclonic interactions helped to refine action research, and how an understanding of cyclonic interactions helped generate rich insight for online management education. It was found that it was the asymmetrical impetus of imperfection that created the examples of cyclonic learning spirals formed as double feedback loops for improved understanding. Online education in the action research required cyclical enhancement of connectedness by teachers, stronger emphasis on relational considerations in learning, and heightened expectations of collaboration by educators. It became possible to correlate earlier conceptions of action research with cyclonic categories and analyse the parallels with events in this action research project. Models were developed and presented to explain cyclonic connections with hermeneutics, collaborative teaching, online resource development, and the environment of online management education