Being Here: Designing for Distributed Hands-On Collaboration in Blended Interaction Spaces

This paper describes a concept for supporting distributed hands-on collaboration through interaction design for the physical and the digital workspace. The Blended Interaction Spaces concept creates distributed work environments in which collaborating parties all feel that they are present 'here' rather than 'there'. We describe thinking and inspirations behind the Blended Interaction Spaces concept, and summarize findings from fieldwork activities informing our design. We then exemplify the Blended Interaction Spaces concept through a prototype implementation of one of four concepts

The role of passenger-centric innovation in the future of public transport

Although hard factors such as availability, efficiency, safety, and comfort make up the core of the public transport quality of service, they are only a part of the bigger picture. This bigger picture is modified and shaped daily, where the increasing permeation of technology creates new possibilities for passengers to experience their journeys.\ud \ud Despite technology becoming ubiquitous in public transport, it has had only limited impact on how passengers connect affectively and symbolically with the service. This “affective gap” is at the core of what differentiates private and public transport. Being able to reduce this gap is therefore valuable to passengers and public transport service providers alike.\ud \ud In this paper, we build on existing and ongoing work to discuss the relevance of a passenger-centric approach to innovation in the field of public transport. This passenger-centric approach puts passengers at the centre of future solutions, where their evolving needs, desires, and values are used to guide how to enhance the existing core functionality of the service.\ud \ud To test our hypothesis that passenger-centric innovation is valuable to passengers and advantageous to service providers alike, we put forward a review on how innovation is being approached in both the aviation and car industries. This review is supported by our own insights, which have been based on data collected from urban rail commuters in Australia. We further support our argument by looking at particular examples of innovation in the field of public transport, and discussing the existing barriers and drivers that can, respectively, hinder or propel passenger-centric innovation

Iterative design and evaluation of regulatory network visualisation at scale

Over the last decade, the development of a range of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies has led to an enormous increase in the size of the data sets available in molecular biology. The scale of these data presents new challenges for researchers, and visualisation is widely regarded as an essential tool for exploration and detailed analysis of candidate relationships. Inevitably, there are cognitive and technical limits on the information which may usefully be displayed on a particular device, and there may be some tension between the analytical utility of a representation and its coverage of the relationships available within the data. Careful attention must be given to the overall design of the visualisation, and to the channels selected, and these tasks are further complicated if the intent is to support interactive exploration by a number of collocated researchers or inclusion within a collaborative workflow

Systeme fuer Experten statt Expertensysteme Von der Folgenforschung zur kompetenzfoerderlichen Gestaltung wissensbasierter Technik

Das vorliegende Buch beschreibt die auf der Basis von Interviews gewonnenen Einschaetzungen des Nutzens von Expertensystemen. Die Folgen des Einsatzes von Expertensystemen wird ebenso einer kritischen Bestandsaufnahme unterzogen, wie die Auswirkungen der Expertentaetigkeit selbst. Systementwickler erarbeiten konzeptionell erweiterte Nutzungsformen. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Funktionsverteilung zwischen Maschine und Mensch, die auf die Unterstuetzung von Expertenarbeit abzieht statt auf ihrer Ersetzung. Die Autoren stellen dar, wie es von der Modifizierbarkeit der Systeme abhaengt, ob sie sich auch nach ihrer Inbetriebnahme an die sich aendernden Beduerfnisse des Marktes anpassen lassen. Das Buch wendet sich in erster Linie an Wissenschaftler, die an Technikfolgenforschung, Software-Ergonomie oder Expertensystemen interessiert sind. Darueber hinaus empfiehlt sich die Lektuere auch fuer die unmittelbar Betroffenen, wie Entwickler und Benutzer von Expertensystemen, sowie die Manager, die ueber Auswahl, Einsatz und Nutzen solcher Systeme entscheidenSIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technologie (BMFT), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

A new toolkit for land value analysis and scenario planning

In the digital era of big data, data analytics and smart cities, a new generation of planning support systems is emerging. The Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer is a novel planning support system developed to help planners and policy-makers determine the likely land value uplift associated with the provision of new city infrastructure. The Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer toolkit was developed following a user-centred research approach including iterative design, prototyping and evaluation. Tool development was informed by user inputs obtained through a series of co-design workshops with two end-user groups: land valuers and urban planners. The paper outlines the underlying technical architecture of the toolkit, which has the ability to perform rapid calculations and visualise the results, for the end-users, through an online mapping interface. The toolkit incorporates an ensemble of hedonic pricing models to calculate and visualise value uplift and so enable the user to explore what if? scenarios. The toolkit has been validated through an iterative case study approach. Use cases were related to two policy areas: property and land valuation processes (for land taxation purposes) and value uplift scenarios (for value capture purposes). The cases tested were in Western Sydney, Australia. The paper reports on the results of the ordinary least square linear regressions – used to explore the impacts of hedonic attributes on property value at the global level – and geographically weighted regressions – developed to provide local estimates and explore the varying spatial relationships between attributes and house price across the study area. Building upon the hedonic modelling, the paper also reports the value uplift functionality of the Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer toolkit that enables users to drag and drop new train stations and rapidly calculate expected property prices under a range of future transport scenarios. The Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer toolkit is believed to be the first of its kind to provide this specific functionality. As it is problem and policy specific, it can be considered an example of the next generation of data-driven planning support system