The object of service design

This book chapter, in a book about service design research co-edited by Daniela Sangiorgi and Alison Prendiville, explores the object of service design and the implications that emerge from different ways of thinking about the topic. Kimbell and Blomberg combine literatures from the social sciences, management and design to identify three different approaches to understanding the object of service design: the service encounter, the value co-creating system and the socio-material configuration. The discussion is brought to life by one particularly successful contemporary service business, Airbnb. The authors then turn to assessing the implications of these different approaches, by discussing cosmologies, accountabilities, temporalities, politics and expertise. Although the resulting triad is a simplification, the chapter offers a provisional answer to the question of what is the object of service design

Regulation of apoptosis during treatment and resistance development in tumour cells

Induction of apoptosis is the most studied cell death process and it is a tightly regulated physiological event that enables elimination of damaged and unwanted cells. Apoptosis can be induced via activation of either the intrinsic or the extrinsic signalling pathway. The intrinsic pathway involves activation of the mitochondria by stress stimuli, whereas the extrinsic pathway is triggered by ligand induced activation of death receptors such as Fas. Apoptosis induction via Fas activation plays an important role in the function of cytotoxic T lymphocytes and in the control of immune cell homeostasis. Several studies have shown that anticancer therapies require functional cell death signalling pathways. Irradiation based therapy has been successful in treatment of several malignancies but the usage of high doses has been associated with side effects. Therefore, low dose therapies, that either is optimized for specific delivery or administrated in combination with other treatments, are promising modalities. However, in order to achieve high-quality effects of such treatments, the death effector mechanisms involved in tumour eradication needs to be further explored. Importantly, tumour cells frequently acquire resistance to apoptosis, which consequently allows tumour cells to escape from elimination by the immune system and/or treatment. Interferons constitute a large family of pleotrophic cytokines that are important for the immune response against viruses and other microorganisms. The interferon signalling pathway mediates transcriptional regulation of hundreds of genes, which result in mRNA degradation, decreased protein synthesis, cell cycle inhibition and induction of apoptosis. Interferon has successfully been used in therapy against some tumours. However, several drawbacks have been reported, such as reduced sensitivity to interferon during treatment. The aim of this thesis was to elucidate mechanisms that mediate resistance to death receptor or interferon induced apoptosis in human tumour cell models, as well as investigate what molecular events that underlie cell death following radiation therapy of tumour cells. In order to elucidate mechanisms involved in acquired resistance to Fas- or interferon-induced apoptosis, a Fas- and interferon-sensitive human cell line, U937, was subjected to conditions where resistance to either Fas- or interferon induced apoptosis was acquired. Characterization of the Fas resistant cells showed that multiple resistant mechanisms had been acquired. Reduced Fas expression and increased cFLIP expression, which is an inhibitor of death receptor signalling, were two important changes found. To further examine the importance of these two alterations, clones from the Fas resistant population were established. The reduced Fas expression was determined to account for the resistant phenotype in approximately 70% of the clones. In the Fas resistant clones with normal Fas expression, the importance of an increased amount of the cFLIP protein was confirmed with shRNA interference. A cross-resistance to death receptor induced apoptosis was detected in the interferon resistant variant, which illustrates that a connection between death receptor and interferon induced apoptosis exists. Notably, interferon resistant cells also contained increased cFLIP expression, which were determined to mediate resistance to both interferon and death receptor mediated apoptosis. Finally, when cell death induced by irradiation treatment was investigated in HeLa Hep2 cells we could demonstrate that cell death was mediated by centrosome hyperamplification and mitotic aberrations, which forced the cells into mitotic catastrophes and delayed apoptosis. In conclusion, we have described model systems where selection for resistance to Fas or interferon induced apoptosis generated a heterogeneous population, where several signalling molecules were altered. Furthermore, we have shown that a complex cell death network was activated by irradiation based therapy

Negotiating meaning of shared information in service system encounters

Summary One of the key components of service systems is access to "shared information" among service providers and clients. Information transparency has been offered as a mediating response to the breakdown in trust and accountability that sometimes accompanies service system encounters. It is argued that by providing access to the operational details of business, public and governmental institutions participants in service relationships - whether citizens, customers, investors, or business partners - are better able to gain the necessary assurances that their interests are being protected. Based on an ethnographic study of the interactions between IT outsourcing executives of a large enterprise service provider and their client counterparts, this paper critically examines the underlying assumptions of the claim that access to information is at the heart of the accountability and trust problem in service systems. This ethnographic study was undertaken to help inform the design and development of a web-enabled portal and dashboard technology that promised to provide transparent views of the performance of IT outsourcing services. The analysis suggests that greater attention should be focused on the role of organization members in negotiating the meaning of service performance information and creating the organizational context for establishing "shared" views of information.Information transparency IT outsourcing Performance metrics Web portals

Studying infrastructuring ethnographically

Abstract This paper is motivated by a methodological interest in how to investigate information infrastructures as an empirical, real-world phenomenon. We argue that research on information infrastructures should not be captive to the prevalent method choice of small-scale and short-term studies. Instead research should address the challenges of empirically studying the heterogeneous, extended and complex phenomena of infrastructuring with an emphasis on the necessarily emerging and open-ended processual qualities of information infrastructures. While existing literature identifies issues that make the study of infrastructuring demanding, few propose ways of addressing these challenges. In this paper we review characteristics of information infrastructures identified in the literature that present challenges for their empirical study. We look to current research in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that focus on how to study complex and extended phenomena ethnographically, to provide insight into the study of infrastructuring. Specifically, we reflect on infrastructuring as an object of ethnographic inquiry by building on the notion of “constructing the field.” Recent developments in how to conceptualize the ethnographic field are tied both to longstanding traditions and novel developments in anthropology and STS for studying extended and complex phenomena. Through a discussion of how dimensions of information infrastructures have been addressed practically, methodologically, and theoretically we aim to link the notion of constructing the ethnographic field with views on infrastructuring as a particular kind of object of inquiry. Thus we aim to provide an ethnographically sensitive and methodologically oriented “opening” for an alternative ontology for studying infrastructuring ethnographically

Reflections on a work-oriented design project.

This article reports our experiences in developing a work-oriented design practice. We sketch our general approach to relating work practice studies and design, including our use of case-based prototypes. We go on to describe our entry into the law firm that was the setting for this project and our decision to focus our design efforts on two forms of work at the firm. We discuss our experiences in developing a case-based prototype to support the work of document search and retrieval. We then describe our encounters with organizational politics at the firm in the context of a joint exploration of image analysis technologies in relation to the work of litigation support. We conclude with findings on the practices of working with document collections, the value of case-based prototypes, and recommendations for combining work practice studies and design interventions

Moving document collections online: The evolution of a shared repository

{trigg, blomberg, suchman}®'pare.xerox.com •• Abstract. This paper reports on a work-oriented design project concerned with the question of how to migrate shared, workgroup document collections currently kept on paper online. Based in a civil engineering work group, the focus of our project is a document collection called the "project files, " a heterogeneous mix of documents that serve as an ongoing resource for the group during a project's course as well as an archival record at its completion. We describe the dynamics of the standardized classification scheme in use for the project files, existing practices of document filing including routine troubles, and the prototype developed to move the project files online. The latter includes a configuration of hardware and software along with associated practices of document scanning, coding and search. We conclude with some reflections on the difficulties of maintaining alignment across paper and digital media in the migration to online document collections, and with a summary of the questions posed and answers provided by our project

New Institutional Approaches to Formal Organizations: An Anthropological Perspective

This chapter addresses anthropology's place within new institutional theory and some of the ways in which it may contribute to understanding of formal organizations. The chapter begins by exploring the meaning of the institutional construct and its relationship to formal organizations, and illustrates some potential advantages to an anthropological approach to new institutionalism. Certain large‐scale formal organizations can be understood as exhibiting institutional characteristics in their own right, and therefore are subject to processes of institutional stability and change (including potentially deinstitutionalization) over long periods of time. Finally, the chapter explores three distinctive analytic dimensions of an anthropological approach to new institutionalism which may orient contributions to this field with those of other disciplines and provide a framework for future discussion