The Video Window: My Life with a Ludic System

The Video Window is a video screen hanging next to a window on my bed-room wall, showing the image from a camera mounted to show the skyline from outside that same window. This paper describes the appeal of living with such a system, and the intermingled aesthetic, utilitarian and practical issues involved in its creation and the experience it offers

\u27Household Managers\u27: Women\u27s Employment in Japan

Despite modern Japan’s evident economic success, persisting inequality between men and women is still apparent in the work field, furthered by societal expectations that drive women away from employment and overwork men. This presentation argues the causes of inequality for women in the work field, including societal expectations and the two-track system, as well as analyzes the effects on women’s lifestyle and careers, including the wage gap and prevalence of non-standard employment. Furthermore, this presentation argues the increasingly detrimental effects of employment inequality on Japanese society as a whole, such as the declining fertility rate. Lastly, this paper will focus on domestic attempts by the state to combat this issue. This research is important, as the problem of inequality in employment is a worldwide phenomenon. Therefore, it is important to study its causes and effects in other states in order to best understand and develop possible solutions

Making Spaces: how design workbooks work

In this paper, I discuss design workbooks, collections of design proposals and related materials, both as a method for design and as a design methodology. In considering them as a method, I describe a number of examples of design workbooks we have developed in our studio and describe some of the practical techniques we have used in developing them. More fundamentally, I discuss design workbooks as embodiments of a methodological approach which recognises that ideas may emerge slowly over time, that important issues and perspectives may emerge from multiple concrete ideas, potentially generated by multiple members of a team, rather than being theory-driven, and that maintaining the provisionality and vagueness of early proposals can be useful in supporting a quasi-participatory design approach that allows participants to interpret, react to and elaborate upon the ideas they present

Gender and Contentious Politics: Women\u27s Effect on the Success of Maximalist Protests

This research addresses the question, “Does gender affect the success of maximalist protest movements?” Using Erica Chenoweth’s Women in Resistance (WiRe) and Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) datasets, this research analyzes 338 maximalist campaigns (protests with the goal of overthrowing a regime) in order to determine if women-led protests are more successful than other types of protests. This quantitative analysis is followed by a case study of the contemporary Iranian women’s movement to test Chenoweth’s theory on nonviolent protests, women, and success

Remembering today tomorrow: exploring the human-centred design of digital mementos

This paper describes two-part research exploring the context for and human-centred design of ‘digital mementos’, as an example of technology for reflection on personal experience(in this case, autobiographical memories). Field studies into families’ use of physical and digital objects for remembering provided a rich understanding of associated user needs and human values, and suggested properties for ‘digital mementos’ such as being ‘not like work’, discoverable and fun. In a subsequent design study, artefacts were devised to express these features and develop the understanding of needs and values further via discussion with groups of potential ‘users’. ‘Critical artefacts’(the products of Critical Design)were used to enable participants to envisage broader possibilities for social practices and applications of technology in the context of personal remembering, and thus to engage in the design of novel devices and systems relevant to their lives. Reflection was a common theme in the work, being what the digital mementos were designed to afford and the mechanism by which the design activity progressed. Ideas for digital mementos formed the output of this research and expressed the designer’s and researcher’s understanding of participants’ practices and needs, and the human values that underlie them and, in doing so, suggest devices and systems that go beyond usability to support a broader conception of human activity

Modeling and estimating system availability

A variety of probability models for single and multiple unit, failure-prone but repairable, systems are reviewed. The purpose of the paper is to provide methods for expressing the uncertainties in system availability in terms of uncertainties in component parameters. A log-linear transformation and the 'jackknife' are shown to be effective. (Author)supported in part by the Electric Power Research Institute, Palo Alto, California, and in part by a National Science Foundation grant at the Naval Postgraduate Schoolhttp://archive.org/details/modelingestimati00gaveNSF Grant AG 476.N