Designing and evaluating mobile multimedia user experiences in public urban places: Making sense of the field

The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities (United Nations, 2008) resulting in an urban densification requiring people to live in closer proximity and share urban infrastructure such as streets, public transport, and parks within cities. However, “physical closeness does not mean social closeness” (Wellman, 2001, p. 234). Whereas it is a common practice to greet and chat with people you cross paths with in smaller villages, urban life is mainly anonymous and does not automatically come with a sense of community per se. Wellman (2001, p. 228) defines community “as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity.” While on the move or during leisure time, urban dwellers use their interactive information communication technology (ICT) devices to connect to their spatially distributed community while in an anonymous space. Putnam (1995) argues that available technology privatises and individualises the leisure time of urban dwellers. Furthermore, ICT is sometimes used to build a “cocoon” while in public to avoid direct contact with collocated people (Mainwaring et al., 2005; Bassoli et al., 2007; Crawford, 2008). Instead of using ICT devices to seclude oneself from the surrounding urban environment and the collocated people within, such devices could also be utilised to engage urban dwellers more with the urban environment and the urban dwellers within. Urban sociologists found that “what attracts people most, it would appear, is other people” (Whyte, 1980, p. 19) and “people and human activity are the greatest object of attention and interest” (Gehl, 1987, p. 31). On the other hand, sociologist Erving Goffman describes the concept of civil inattention, acknowledging strangers’ presence while in public but not interacting with them (Goffman, 1966). With this in mind, it appears that there is a contradiction between how people are using ICT in urban public places and for what reasons and how people use public urban places and how they behave and react to other collocated people. On the other hand there is an opportunity to employ ICT to create and influence experiences of people collocated in public urban places. The widespread use of location aware mobile devices equipped with Internet access is creating networked localities, a digital layer of geo-coded information on top of the physical world (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011). Foursquare.com is an example of a location based 118 Mobile Multimedia – User and Technology Perspectives social network (LBSN) that enables urban dwellers to virtually check-in into places at which they are physically present in an urban space. Users compete over ‘mayorships’ of places with Foursquare friends as well as strangers and can share recommendations about the space. The research field of Urban Informatics is interested in these kinds of digital urban multimedia augmentations and how such augmentations, mediated through technology, can create or influence the UX of public urban places. “Urban informatics is the study, design, and practice of urban experiences across different urban contexts that are created by new opportunities of real-time, ubiquitous technology and the augmentation that mediates the physical and digital layers of people networks and urban infrastructures” (Foth et al., 2011, p. 4). One possibility to augment the urban space is to enable citizens to digitally interact with spaces and urban dwellers collocated in the past, present, and future. “Adding digital layer to the existing physical and social layers could facilitate new forms of interaction that reshape urban life” (Kjeldskov & Paay, 2006, p. 60). This methodological chapter investigates how the design of UX through such digital placebased mobile multimedia augmentations can be guided and evaluated. First, we describe three different applications that aim to create and influence the urban UX through mobile mediated interactions. Based on a review of literature, we describe how our integrated framework for designing and evaluating urban informatics experiences has been constructed. We conclude the chapter with a reflective discussion on the proposed framework

Tensions and paradoxes in electronic patient record research: a systematic literature review using the meta-narrative method

Background: The extensive and rapidly expanding research literature on electronic patient records (EPRs) presents challenges to systematic reviewers. This literature is heterogeneous and at times conflicting, not least because it covers multiple research traditions with different underlying philosophical assumptions and methodological approaches. Aim: To map, interpret and critique the range of concepts, theories, methods and empirical findings on EPRs, with a particular emphasis on the implementation and use of EPR systems. Method: Using the meta-narrative method of systematic review, and applying search strategies that took us beyond the Medline-indexed literature, we identified over 500 full-text sources. We used ‘conflicting’ findings to address higher-order questions about how the EPR and its implementation were differently conceptualised and studied by different communities of researchers. Main findings: Our final synthesis included 24 previous systematic reviews and 94 additional primary studies, most of the latter from outside the biomedical literature. A number of tensions were evident, particularly in relation to: [1] the EPR (‘container’ or ‘itinerary’); [2] the EPR user (‘information-processer’ or ‘member of socio-technical network’); [3] organizational context (‘the setting within which the EPR is implemented’ or ‘the EPR-in-use’); [4] clinical work (‘decision-making’ or ‘situated practice’); [5] the process of change (‘the logic of determinism’ or ‘the logic of opposition’); [6] implementation success (‘objectively defined’ or ‘socially negotiated’); and [7] complexity and scale (‘the bigger the better’ or ‘small is beautiful’). Findings suggest that integration of EPRs will always require human work to re-contextualize knowledge for different uses; that whilst secondary work (audit, research, billing) may be made more efficient by the EPR, primary clinical work may be made less efficient; that paper, far from being technologically obsolete, currently offers greater ecological flexibility than most forms of electronic record; and that smaller systems may sometimes be more efficient and effective than larger ones. Conclusions: The tensions and paradoxes revealed in this study extend and challenge previous reviews and suggest that the evidence base for some EPR programs is more limited than is often assumed. We offer this paper as a preliminary contribution to a much-needed debate on this evidence and its implications, and suggest avenues for new research

Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

Does \u2018bigger\u2019mean \u2018better\u2019? Pitfalls and shortcuts associated with big data for social research

\u2018Big data is here to stay.\u2019 This key statement has a double value: is an assumption as well as the reason why a theoretical reflection is needed. Furthermore, Big data is something that is gaining visibility and success in social sciences even, overcoming the division between humanities and computer sciences. In this contribution some considerations on the presence and the certain persistence of Big data as a socio-technical assemblage will be outlined. Therefore, the intriguing opportunities for social research linked to such interaction between practices and technological development will be developed. However, despite a promissory rhetoric, fostered by several scholars since the birth of Big data as a labelled concept, some risks are just around the corner. The claims for the methodological power of bigger and bigger datasets, as well as increasing speed in analysis and data collection, are creating a real hype in social research. Peculiar attention is needed in order to avoid some pitfalls. These risks will be analysed for what concerns the validity of the research results \u2018obtained through Big data. After a pars distruens, this contribution will conclude with a pars construens; assuming the previous critiques, a mixed methods research design approach will be described as a general proposal with the objective of stimulating a debate on the integration of Big data in complex research projecting

Exploiting connectedness in the informatics curriculum

The power of modern communication technology gives us an opportunity, as Informatics educators, to enhance our ability to develop our students' skills in virtual teamworking. We discuss why virtual teamworking is as relevant for students in traditional campus-based universities as it is in a distance learning context. We highlight some of the questions to be answered, and some of the problems to be overcome, in the context of our experiences in designing and delivering a virtual teamworking course at the UK Open University

Identifying Research Fields within Business and Management: A Journal Cross-Citation Analysis

A discipline such as business and management (B&M) is very broad and has many fields within it, ranging from fairly scientific ones such as management science or economics to softer ones such as information systems. There are at least three reasons why it is important to identify these sub-fields accurately. Firstly, to give insight into the structure of the subject area and identify perhaps unrecognised commonalities; second for the purpose of normalizing citation data as it is well known that citation rates vary significantly between different disciplines. And thirdly, because journal rankings and lists tend to split their classifications into different subjects – for example, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) list, which is a standard in the UK, has 22 different fields. Unfortunately, at the moment these are created in an ad hoc manner with no underlying rigour. The purpose of this paper is to identify possible sub-fields in B&M rigorously based on actual citation patterns. We have examined 450 journals in B&M which are included in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) and analysed the cross-citation rates between them enabling us to generate sets of coherent and consistent sub-fields that minimise the extent to which journals appear in several categories. Implications and limitations of the analysis are discussed

The New Economy- Knowledge Based Economy

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the importance of knowledge based economy, in this time characterized by fast changes and sometimes radical changes, it is impossible to resist without adapting, both people and the organizations too. The matter of the paper develops knowledge based economy concept: elements, definitions of the knowledge based economy, stages and the main knowledge codification. In the end of the paper, the author presents the importance of economy knowledge, in Romanian organizations.knowledge based economy, knowledge society, knowledge based organization, longlife learning, learning organization

Investing in People

Foundations have long created programs to provide grants to individuals—most often in the form of fellowships, scholarships, and prizes. Several of these programs have become so prominent that they are now institutions in and of themselves. Consider just a few examples: the Pulitzer Prize, Fulbright Program, and MacArthur "genius" awards. Governments, as well as foundations large and small, fund individual support programs.The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has generously allowed the authors of this report to examine its portfolio of individual support programs to explore what the authors believe are some of the strategic fundamentals underlying this type of programming that could be applied to future individual support grantmaking. The purpose of this study is to inform those interested in individual support programs about not only some of the strategy considerations underlying this type of grantmaking but what these programs can be expected to achieve—and under what circumstances.