Weaving Lighthouses and Stitching Stories: Blind and Visually Impaired People Designing E-textiles

We describe our experience of working with blind and visually impaired people to create interactive art objects that are personal to them, through a participatory making process using electronic textiles (e-textiles) and hands-on crafting techniques. The research addresses both the practical considerations about how to structure hands-on making workshops in a way which is accessible to participants of varying experience and abilities, and how effective the approach was in enabling participants to tell their own stories and feel in control of the design and making process. The results of our analysis is the offering of insights in how to run e-textile making sessions in such a way for them to be more accessible and inclusive to a wider community of participants

Participatory game prototyping – balancing domain content and playability in a serious game design for the energy transition

Game design mostly engages future players as users and testers, whereas in the field of serious game design, approaches involving players more substantially are slowly emerging. This paper documents the participatory prototyping process of Energy Safari, a serious game for the energy transition in the Province of Groningen, and reports on the differences of the contributions made to the game development by separate groups of stakeholders. Each group contributed the most to the game elements that are most relevant to their interests. Overall, this study points to the potential of participatory game prototyping as a method to develop serious games that are balanced both in terms of domain content and playability, are meaningful for future players, and well embedded in the local context

Digital Work Design

Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenzen (http://www.nationallizenzen.ch)More and more academic studies and practitioner reports claim that human work is increasingly disrupted or even determined by information and communication technology (ICT) (Cascio and Montealegre 2016). This will make a considerable share of jobs currently performed by humans susceptible to automation (e.g., Frey and Osborne 2017; Manyika et al. 2017). These reports often sketch a picture of ‘machines taking over’ traditional domains like manufacturing, while ICT advances and capabilities seem to decide companies’ fate. Consequently, ICT is often put at the core of innovative efforts. While this applies to nearly all areas of workplace design, a recent popular example of increasing technology centricity is ‘Industry 4.0’, which is often delineated as ‘machines talking to computers’

Known and unknown requirements in healthcare

We report experience in requirements elicitation of domain knowledge from experts in clinical and cognitive neurosciences. The elicitation target was a causal model for early signs of dementia indicated by changes in user behaviour and errors apparent in logs of computer activity. A Delphi-style process consisting of workshops with experts followed by a questionnaire was adopted. The paper describes how the elicitation process had to be adapted to deal with problems encountered in terminology and limited consensus among the experts. In spite of the difficulties encountered, a partial causal model of user behavioural pathologies and errors was elicited. This informed requirements for configuring data- and text-mining tools to search for the specific data patterns. Lessons learned for elicitation from experts are presented, and the implications for requirements are discussed as “unknown unknowns”, as well as configuration requirements for directing data-/text-mining tools towards refining awareness requirements in healthcare applications

Distributed-PD: challenges and opportunities

A limitation of Participatory Design (PD) is that it has primarily focused on project stakeholders being co-located, whereas in recent years we are starting to see software development projects involve more distributed collaborations. This panel grows out of the issues raised from a series of workshops on Distributed Participatory Design (http://distributedpd.com/) and discusses the experiences and challenges of performing PD in distributed design teams

On the relative importance of privacy guidelines for ambient health care

We present an empirical study regarding the relative importance of complying with privacy related guidelines in the context of a Health Monitoring System. Participants were confronted with text scenarios describing privacy related aspects of a health monitoring service for daily use at home. Participants assessed the relative importance to them of simplified variants of the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) guidelines for the protection of personal data. The guidelines that relate to Insight and Openness were most valued. The guidelines relating to Modification and Data Quality were valued least by most participants in this context. Methodological challenges were encountered on the way, which reveal the complexity of conducting empirical investigations of privacy aspects of human-computer interaction