From wicked problem to design problem: Developing actionable briefs and solution opportunities through a collaborative, multidisciplinary design-led approach

This paper argues that using a design-led approach is highly beneficial when tackling complex problems to transform ambiguity into actionable design briefs and solution opportunities. This is evidenced by way of an ongoing project with a large public-sector organisation. Northumbria University’s School of Design academic experts use design-led approaches to innovation that promote ‘creative fusion’ between diverse stakeholders in order to tackle ‘wicked problems’. The authors continue this work as part of an AHRC/ERDF-funded programme entitled Creative Fuse North East (CFNE), along with five regional universities, of which the project discussed here is a part. The main objective of which is to develop and deploy approaches to innovation that apply skills from creative graduates to benefit the wider creative economy, address barriers to innovation and promote growth and sustainability within and without of the Creative, Digital and IT sector (CDIT). It will be argued that to do this it is vital to convert stakeholders into co-creation activists empowered with the creative confidence required to speculate about uncertain futures

RDFsim: Similarity-Based Browsing over DBpedia Using Embeddings

Browsing has been the core access method for the Web from its beginning. Analogously, one good practice for publishing data on the Web is to support dereferenceable URIs, to also enable plain web browsing by users. The information about one URI is usually presented through HTML tables (such as DBpedia and Wikidata pages) and graph representations (by using tools such as LODLive and LODMilla). In most cases, for an entity, the user gets all triples that have that entity as subject or as object. However, sometimes the number of triples is numerous. To tackle this issue, and to reveal similarity (and thus facilitate browsing), in this article we introduce an interactive similarity-based browsing system, called RDFsim, that offers “Parallel Browsing”, that is, it enables the user to see and browse not only the original data of the entity in focus, but also the K most similar entities of the focal entity. The similarity of entities is founded on knowledge graph embeddings; however, the indexes that we introduce for enabling real-time interaction do not depend on the particular method for computing similarity. We detail an implementation of the approach over specific subsets of DBpedia (movies, philosophers and others) and we showcase the benefits of the approach. Finally, we report detailed performance results and we describe several use cases of RDFsim

From conflict to catalyst: using critical conflict as a creative device in design-led innovation practice

Cyberspace is global; it allows for an unimaginable number of actors and interactions. The internet can be a place for creativity, fun and community, yet it is also a vehicle for criminal and damaging behaviour. It is, therefore, not surprising that on topics of cybercrime there are many stakeholders with contrasting perspectives. If, in a design-led approach to wicked problems, it is vital to involve people from diverse backgrounds, it is important to consider how to make the process of generating ideas based on frames accessible to them. A collaboration with a regional law enforcement agency provided the context for research into participatory design approaches that considered the question: what design-led approach and resources construct and present critical human conflicts as creative stimulus for participatory design events? This paper explores the challenges, limitations and value of a ‘Creative Tensions’ device that aimed to help participants develop solutions by offering ‘frames’ that they can ‘look through’, that may well deviate from their own experiences. Using a set of semi-structured interviews, this research presents an analysis of the device (its production, context and use) detailing practical steps and resources that support the development and use of frames in a multi-disciplinary multi-stakeholder participatory design event

Odyssey: A Journey in the Land of Distributed Data Series Similarity Search

This paper presents Odyssey, a novel distributed data-series processing framework that efficiently addresses the critical challenges of exhibiting good speedup and ensuring high scalability in data series processing by taking advantage of the full computational capacity of modern distributed systems comprised of multi-core servers. Odyssey addresses a number of challenges in designing efficient and highly-scalable distributed data series index, including efficient scheduling, and load-balancing without paying the prohibitive cost of moving data around. It also supports a flexible partial replication scheme, which enables Odyssey to navigate through a fundamental trade-off between data scalability and good performance during query answering. Through a wide range of configurations and using several real and synthetic datasets, our experimental analysis demonstrates that Odyssey achieves its challenging goals. This paper appeared in PVLDB Volume 16, Issue 5, 2023