Context Engineering: An IS Development Research Agenda

The authors present the Context Engineering (CE) approach to Information Systems Development (ISD) as a framework to organise ideas about previous development experience and to guide future research on specific ISD methods and techniques. The goals of the CE approach are: to achieve an understanding of the ISD as socio-technical phenomena within a cultural and historical envelope; to provide a framework of problems supported on the relation between context and mediators; and to use contextuality as a key to performing emancipatory movements. Fundamental concepts are the notions of context as figure-ground and as autopoietic flux, of human activity as unit of contextual analysis, of the pervasiveness of mediation in human activity, of socio-technical networks as media and the hypothesis of a heterogeneous social engineering. A framework of development problems is presented along with a discussion of general and process related principles for the CE approach

Characterizing Proof-of-Concept Practices using the Lens of Context Engineering

In this study, a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) context is acknowledged as an activity system with a set of practices performed by diverse practitioners, aiming to produce knowledge about performance of the technological artifacts under study. Ten PoC practices were identified through content analysis of narratives and observations, supported by the lens of Context Engineering (CE) from Information Systems (IS). CE introduces a framework of problems that help to understand the relevance of context as a fundamental factor in PoC, emphasizing the importance and need for reflection in action, for PoC practitioners. These practices are characterized as a cycle of knowledge production in the PoC context. The authors also identify the hermeneutic character of PoC activities, indicating a need to understand the whole activity system in relation to its constituent parts, while finding the meaning of the parts in the whole PoC context

From Hands-on Sessions to User Insights on Designing an Interactive System for Data Science

Our design research goal is to improve the user experience and effectiveness of an integrated IT solution for supporting the creative and collaborative Data Science (DS) life-cycle process. The work is being done as a Design Science Research (DSR) project, in real-life context. Within a fast-pace development environment, with scarce access to end-users, we combined hands-on sessions and semi-structured user interviews into a fast-forward design insights technique ([aka insightz]) to capture: i) people interests and expectations about the tool (leading to design improvements) and ii) stakeholders’ insights about the DS process itself (leading to process and business innovation). We propose these insightz workshops and the user research approach as a design technique to define and to communicate design principles and guidelines between different stakeholders, namely, UI/UX and engineering teams

How to Design An Interactive System for Data Science: A Literature Review

As part of an ongoing design science research project, we present a systematic literature review and the classification of 214 papers scoping the work on Data Science (DS) in the fields of Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction. The overall search was conducted on Web of Science, Science Direct and ACM Digital Library, for papers about the design of IT artefacts for Data Science, over the period of 1997 until 2017. Our work confirms a rich interdisciplinary field of inquiry and identifies promising research clusters, with examples. Moreover, we found few studies with concrete guidance on how to design a system for DS when targeting for broader technical and business user profiles and multi-domain application. Being a multidimensional and creative complex process, there is potential in the development of hybrid methods of design theory and practice, for a variety of further work from researchers and practitioners

A Sociotechnical Conjecture about the Context and Development of Multiplayer Online Game Experiences

The advent of multiplayer online games brings new actors into the development scene and redefines traditional roles and interactions. Anchored on studies of the role of context in human interaction we argue for a view of multiplayer online games as sociotechnical constructs, and of their “development ” as an ongoing process of context engineering. By recognizing the new interplay of actors that extends from design time well into play time we attempt to transcend the technological determinism of approaches that focus on technological devices as determinants of the game experience. Using Actor-Network Theory constructs we propose an alternative perspective that takes context as the development object and technical artifacts, social and game rules, roles, playing and organizational strategies and practices as media designed to influence the emergence of the heterogeneous sociotechnical networks governing online game experiences. Finally, we outline challenges for the innovation of designer and player roles

Guidelines for sound design in computer games

The inconsequential exploitation of sound in most computer games, both in extent and nature, contrasts with its prominence in our daily lives and with the kind of associations that have been explored in domains such as music and cinema. Sound design remains the craft of a talented minority and the unavailability of a public body of knowledge on the subject has greatly contributed to this state of affairs. This leads to a mix of alienation and best-judgment improvisation in the broader development community. A sensitivity to the potential of sound for the enrichment of the experience—with emphasis on game specifics—is, therefore, necessary. This study presents a contribution to the practice of sound design for computer games. An approach to intentional sound design, informed by multi-disciplinary interpretations of concepts including emotion, context, acoustic ecology, soundscape, resonance, and entrainment, is distilled into a set of design guidelines that holistically address the different sound layers

Studying an Author-Oriented Approach to Procedural Content Generation through Participatory Design

Part 2: Short papersInternational audienceThe paper describes the design research process of a procedural content generation tool aimed at supporting creative game design processes. An author oriented approach to procedural content generation tools is used where these tools can be manipulated so as to let authors define the design space they want to explore and the design solution they wish to find, therefore maintaining their creative agenda intact. We present two Participatory Design exercises where game designers were tasked with creating a complete Interface Design for an implementation of this approach. Content Analysis from participants’ discourse during these design exercises showed two important results. First, designers have trouble understanding how this procedural content generation works, and how to express their design problem within its conceptual framework. Second, subjects were averse to a pure optimization led approach to content generation and suggested the need for an exploratory phase, where content is created only to grasp the design landscape, without having to specifically define the desired solution

Simpler, Better, Faster, Cheaper, Contextual: Requirements Analysis for a Methodological Approach to Interaction Systems Development

In the Cyberspace context Information Systems become Interaction Systems, effective mediators of the activities performed. Our goal is to consider the challenges of such a scenario and analyse the requirements for a methodological approach to the development of Interaction Systems. To that aim, the authors resort to the Activity Theory as an analytic tool and establish general and specific requirements for such an approach