Using System Analysis and Personas for e-Health Interaction Design

Today, designers obtain more central roles in product and service development (Perks, Cooper, & Jones, 2005). They have to deal with increasingly complicated problems, like integrating the needs of various stakeholders while taking care about social, ethical and ecological consequences of their designs. To deal with this demanding design situation, they need to apply new methods to organize the available information and to negotiate the stakeholder’s perspectives. This paper describes how systems analysis supports the design process in a complex environment. In a case study, we demonstrate how this method enables designers to describe user requirements for complex design environments while considering the perspectives of various stakeholders. We present a design research project applying cybernetic systems analysis using the software ''System-Tools'' (Vester, 2002). Results from the analysis were taken to inform the design of an electronic patient record (EPR), considering the particularities of the German health care system. Based on the analysis, we developed a set of requirements for every stakeholder group, detailing the patients' perspective with persona descriptions. We then picked a main persona as reference for the EPR design. We describe the resulting design sketch and discuss the value of cybernetic systems analysis as a tool to deal with complex social environments. The result shows how the method helps designers to structure and organize information about the context and identify fruitful intervention opportunities for design. Keywords: E-Health; System Analysis, Cybernetics; Personas.</p

Explorations on Textile Electronics

In electronic textiles, we apply production techniques from both textiles and electronic engineering to bridge the gap between these two very different materials. While it is obvious to apply electronic engineering to textiles to ensure the working of the electronic components, the application of textile production techniques to electronics is still challenging. Yet it is in the appropriation of textile manufacturing that there is a huge potential for innovation. This potential does not only cover the means of production, but also the way we interact with digital interfaces as well as the overall aesthetic of those interfaces. This report documents the application of textile production techniques for sensing and actuation in e-textile structures and artifacts. It shows how weaving and knitting on industrial machines can be used to design and build electronic elements in a textile shape, such as pressure sensors, speaker coils and shape change structures. The report also documents the application of those techniques in two different prototypes, the first being a sensor glove that was used for gesture recognition, and the second being woven textile muscle that was developed as the basis for a soft textile robot.

The multi-touch soundscape renderer

In this paper, we introduce a direct manipulation tabletop multi-touch user interface for spatial audio scenes. Although spatial audio rendering existed for several decades now, mass market applications have not been developed and the user interfaces still address a small group of expert users. We implemented an easy-to-use direct manipulation interface for multiple users, taking full advantage of the object-based audio rendering mode. Two versions of the user interface have been developed to explore variations in information architecture and will be evaluated in user tests