people centred production design

This case reports on a worldwide operating SME producing floor cleaning machines. The SME distinguishes itself from its competitors by providing highly customizable high-quality products. Employees are one of the "most-valuable resources" to the management. However, the initial situation reveals significant improvement opportunities related to the employee involvement and empowerment concerning workplace re-design. The proposed subject-oriented solution aims to involve shop floor workers in workplace (re-)design by providing them structural empowerment means such as social media for suggestion proposals, discussions and negotiations. Furthermore, the newly introduced features are designed to allow for context-sensitive reporting of suggestions and errors. Context-sensitive elicitation provides the basis for analysing impacts of changes (e.g. the affected location or worker) and visualizing potential improvement areas within the shop floor. The generic suggestion and error handling process can be tailored to different organizations. The S-BPM process handling has been integrated with a semantic wiki allowing for context-sensitive workplace improvement elicitation and change propagation analysis. The evaluation reports on findings in developer workshops, focus groups and user tests conducted in parallel to the design and implementation to ensure a user-centred approach (formative part), and on findings related to the outcome of the case implementations at the given SME (summative part)

The Beverton-Holt q-Difference equation with periodic growth rate

In this paper, we study the Beverton–Holt equation with periodic inherent growth rate and periodic carrying capacity in the quantum calculus time setting. After a brief introduction to quantum calculus, we solve the Beverton–Holt q-difference equation using the logistic transformation. This leads to a linear q-difference equation where the solution is obtained using variation of parameters. The analysis of the solution aids our investigation of the first and second Cushing–Henson conjectures under the assumption of a periodic growth rate and a periodic carrying capacity. The first Cushing–Henson conjecture holds in the classical sense, which guarantees the existence of a unique periodic solution which is globally attractive. The analysis of the average of the unique periodic solution of the Beverton–Holt q-difference equation yields formulations of modified second Cushing–Henson conjectures

Designing Game-Based Interventions for Subverting Normative Attitudes

Part 3: Serious GamesInternational audienceThe present study explores persuasive and interventional strategies for designing and evaluating low-threshold browser games that adequately aim for affording prejudice-reducing social impact in everyday life scenarios. Our investigation was guided by the premise that a covert persuasion approach is suited for also reaching out to otherwise adverse attitude holders. Building on a framework for embedding change-related messages into games by their design, and in combination with rhetorical techniques and subversive strategies from queer-theoretical philosophy and social psychology, we modified an existing impactful game about Coming Out so as to obfuscate its change-related content, and make it more approachable for a not-queer audience. The evaluation of the modified prototype suggests the efficacy of the employed strategies for facilitating and elevating emotional engagement based on group membership effects, which is linked to a greater potential for attitude change and prejudice reduction