How often do you wash your hair? design as disordering: everyday routines, human object theories, probes and sustainablity

New objects can create disorder in our lives particularly when we try to appropriate and make sense of newly developed products that do not fit our routines. Ultimately, through exploring objects' affordances, our relationship to them develops into a routinised practice we no longer reflect on them. Hair care is universal and (often) an ‘ordinary’ part of our daily routines. Our cleanliness routines consume resources and therefore are implicated in the issue of environmental sustainability. However, routines are complex and difficult to change when they are set in a culture of individual consumer choice. The disorder inherent in the process of appropriation raises the possibility that design might deliberately create a useful ‘disorder’ in routinised practices to facilitate sustainable strategies in everyday life. The paper proposes an approach of investigating routinised practices in relation to deliberately creating disorder in everyday routines and practice theory. Further, it outlines a pilot study that uses the designled method of 'probes' and considers its potentials in generating disorder. It identifies creative disorder in the process of designers developing the probes, participants interacting with them to finally designers receiving the results. Thinking about the process in terms of disorder is seen to be valuable in facilitating, applying and developing probes, not only to inspire the designer but also to sensitise the designer to private and intimate areas of everyday life such as hair care.</p

Are you worth it? A practice-orientated approach to everyday hair care to inform sustainable consumption strategies

This thesis investigates the potential in applying a practice-orientated approach to women’s everyday hair care routines to inform sustainable design and sustainable consumption strategies. It seeks to develop an understanding of the multi-relational elements that make up the practice and to recognise how these elements influence what women do to their hair, and how often, and how these actions therefore impact on resource use. A practice-orientated approach is argued to provide insights into aspects of the dynamics of everyday life that can help design for sustainability to engage with the complexities of routines that are not accessible to current sustainability strategies. This thesis builds on Shove’s (2004; 2003) work on sustainable consumption. Shove (2004) has identified some limitations of current sustainable consumption approaches that try to address people’s behaviours and consider the environmental and social implications of products in their use phase. She has recognised that everyday routines are complex and difficult to change through approaches that only consider people’s attitudes towards the environment and choices they might make to change their behaviours. In order to overcome such limitations, Shove (2004) has advocated an alternative approach inspired by practice theory (Reckwitz 2002). Her recommendation instigated the need for this research study that examines whether explorative research orientated to practices remedies the current limitations. It does this by reflecting on the potential for design to change practices

Alternative technology niches and sustainable development: 12 years on

This article provides brief, personal reflections on developments in the research fields of sociotechnical transitions theory and grassroots innovation since publication of the article ‘Alternative technology niches and sustainable developments’. What is striking about work since then is the importance for sustainable development of interaction and contestation between diverse approaches to innovation. Rather than looking for general models for sustainable innovation, research can fruitfully understand interactions and exclusions between diverse approaches. Undertaken critically and reflexively, such work sheds light on the wider social structures that inhibit a more democratic innovation politics

Enabling Proactive Adaptation through Just-in-time Testing of Conversational Services

Service-based applications (SBAs) will increasingly be composed of third-party services available over the Internet. Reacting to failures of those third-party services by dynamically adapting the SBAs will become a key enabler for ensuring reliability. Determining when to adapt an SBA is especially challenging in the presence of conversational (aka. stateful) services. A conversational service might fail in the middle of an invocation sequence, in which case adapting the SBA might be costly; e.g., due to the necessary state transfer to an alternative service. In this paper we propose just-in-time testing of conversational services as a novel approach to detect potential problems and to proactively trigger adaptations, thereby preventing costly compensation activities. The approach is based on a framework for online testing and a formal test-generation method which guarantees functional correctness for conversational services. The applicability of the approach is discussed with respect to its underlying assumptions and its performance. The benefits of the approach are demonstrated using a realistic example

Determination of the blood oxygenation in the brain by time-resolved reflectance spectroscopy: contribution of vascular absorption and tissue background absorption

The possibility of measuring the blood oxygenation in the brain with near infrared light has been studied. The goal of this study was to quantify the influence of different brain layers on brain blood oxygenation measurements. Experimental results obtained from time resolved reflectance measurements on layered tissue phantoms were compared to Monte Carlo simulations of layered models, diffusion theory, and in vivo measurements on the human head. Both the experimental results and simulations show that the absorption coefficient (mu) a, which is closely related to the blood oxygenation, of deeper layers can be accessed in the time domain. Thus fitting analytical expressions found from diffusion theory only to the late part of the time resolved reflectance allows us to determine (mu) a and subsequently the blood oxygenation of the deepest medium (e.g. brain tissue)

Making the most of community energies:Three perspectives on grassroots innovation

Grassroots innovations for sustainability are attracting increasing policy attention. Drawing upon a wide range of empirical research into community energy in the UK, and taking recent support from national government as a case study, we apply three distinct analytical perspectives: strategic niche management; niche policy advocacy; and critical niches. Whilst the first and second perspectives appear to explain policy influence in grassroots innovation adequately, each also shuts out more transformational possibilities. We therefore argue that, if grassroots innovation is to realise its full potential, then we need to also pursue a third, critical niches perspective, and open up debate about more socially transformative pathways to sustainability

Spotting the diffusion of New Psychoactive Substances over the Internet

Online availability and diffusion of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) represent an emerging threat to healthcare systems. In this work, we analyse drugs forums, online shops, and Twitter. By mining the data from these sources, it is possible to understand the dynamics of drugs diffusion and their endorsement, as well as timely detecting new substances. We propose a set of visual analytics tools to support analysts in tackling NPS spreading and provide a better insight about drugs market and analysis

A World Full of Privacy and Security (Mis)conceptions? Findings of a Representative Survey in 12 Countries

Misconceptions about digital security and privacy topics in the general public frequently lead to insecure behavior. However, little is known about the prevalence and extent of such misconceptions in a global context. In this work, we present the results of the first large-scale survey of a global population on misconceptions: We conducted an online survey with n = 12, 351 participants in 12 countries on four continents. By investigating influencing factors of misconceptions around eight common security and privacy topics (including E2EE, Wi-Fi, VPN, and malware), we find the country of residence to be the strongest estimate for holding misconceptions. We also identify differences between non-Western and Western countries, demonstrating the need for region-specific research on user security knowledge, perceptions, and behavior. While we did not observe many outright misconceptions, we did identify a lack of understanding and uncertainty about several fundamental privacy and security topics