How to Design More Empathetic Recommender Systems in Social Media

Social media’s value proposition heavily relies on recommender systems suggesting products to buy, events to attend, or people to connect with. These systems currently prioritize user engagement and social media providers’ profit generation over individual users’ well-being. However, making these systems more “empathetic” would benefit social media providers and content creators as users would use social media more often, longer, and increasingly recommend it to other users. By way of a design science research approach, including twelve interviews with system designers, social media experts, psychologists, and users, we develop user-centric design knowledge on making recommender systems in social media more “empathetic.” This design knowledge comprises a conceptual framework, four meta-requirements, and six design principles. It contributes to the research streams “digital responsibility” and “IS for resilience” and provides practical guidance in developing socially responsible recommender systems as next-generation social media services

Grief in the Digital Age - Review, Synthesis, and Directions for Future Research

Death and grief are going digital. Start-up companies are working on avatars that people feed with personal information while alive so that relatives can communicate with this artificial self after death. This is supposed to make it easier to say goodbye. Considering these digital innovations, the IS community should be the leading discipline for handling grief. However, IS scholars attribute grief to other disciplines, such as psychology. Like any crisis, also grief cannot be merited to one single discipline. We conduct a literature review and synthesis alongside the ‘BAO framework’ [1]. Findings suggest that IS research has so far not grasped the consequences of grief on either individual or organizational and societal levels. To spark future research, we propose 9 clear-cut IS research questions. The provided comprehensive understanding of IS intersecting grief is crucial for different (also practical) stakeholders to leverage the potential of IS in coping with grief

Farm Life in the City - A Taxonomy for Smart Urban Agriculture

With more than half of the global population living in cities, current food production has reached sustainability limits. Urban agriculture has moved from an issue at the edge of public discourse to its center to feed future city dwellers. However, cities are hostile for terrestrial life, jeopardizing the availability of important primary resources, such as air, water, or soil. While smart technologies on traditional farms have accelerated the past years (e.g., autonomous tractors), we know little about their potential and applicability in urban areas. Until today, we have little theoretical insights into smart urban agriculture. We offer a multi-layer taxonomy of smart urban agriculture technologies that contributes to the descriptive knowledge in this field while also elucidating the impact on the transformation of cities towards sustainability

Life is a Journey in Smart and Sustainable Districts

Worldwide, cities grapple with the expectation of putting the brakes on climate change. Before acting, smart districts often serve as a testing bed for strategies towards carbon-neutrality. If effective, scale-up agendas at city-level are formulated. Smart districts are touted for their sustainability lever, as their core rationale is encouraging residents to use ‘smart energy technologies’ which increase efficiency or integrate renewable energy sources. The primary focus of these districts is on technical implementations of available sustainability services instead of orienting their service-portfolio around citizens. The result is a mismatch of supply and demand of sustainability-inducing services. We take in a customer journey perspective when searching for literature and conducting qualitative interviews. Results reveal a framework for mapping service touchpoints into citizen journeys. The framework is meant to benefit district planners to tailor their service selection to meet their citizens’ needs and exploit the district’s sustainability potential at the citizen interface

Information Systems for Sustainable Use of Water in Smart Cities: A Review and Call for Future Research

Water is the basis of life—that being said, the rising scarcity triggered by climate change and urbanization is an increasingly important challenge in urban areas. The United Nations present “water” as one of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and experts make impassionate calls for sustainable water management solutions as a seminal part of smart cities. While there are numerous research efforts in the IS community regarding certain SDGs and smart cities, we demonstrate in a structured literature review that urban water scarcity is still a blind spot. In this paper, we present pathways for future research alleys on this topic. We sketch out a vision for a smart city water system that is based on a novel information system. We draw on the energy informatics framework as a theoretical basis for our work and provide a context-specific discussion on its transferability to the resource of water in smart cities. By introducing urban water scarcity to the IS research agenda and showing opportunities as well as boundaries for the transfer of the energy informatics framework, we hope to stimulate IS researchers to be more active in pursuing research efforts in this pressing topic

The Design of Citizen-Centric Green IS in Sustainable Smart Districts

Green information systems are often praised for their potential to foster sustainability in citizens’ daily lives and meet their needs. With this focus on citizens, districts that use smart technologies provide a litmus test, the results of which will indicate how to design smart green information systems that better meet the needs and desires of citizens. To date, however, guidelines on how to design such green information systems in urban areas or actively involve citizens in this process are few and far between. In recognition and remedy of this shortage, the study draws on the design science research paradigm to develop seven design principles for citizen-centric green information systems that can be used in sustainable smart districts. These principles are evaluated in 15 semi-structured interviews and a prototype of a mobile district app for a citizen-centric green information system is instantiated. By taking this citizen-centric perspective, the paper fosters the active involvement of humans in the design of sustainable urban environments

Towards an evaluation of incentives and nudges for smart charging

Electric vehicles (EVs) are an important cornerstone to achieve transport decarbonization. Still, simultaneous charging of EVs when home charging increases peak demand, especially during evenings. Smart charging allows optimal distribution of load, thus preventing peak loads. Nevertheless, this incorporates certain risks for the EV user, e.g., unavailability of EVs for unplanned events. This might lead to a lack of user acceptance. This paper focuses on specific incentives and nudges, motivating users to adopt smart charging. We conducted an integrative literature review, bringing together literature from different areas. Possible incentives and nudges are monetary incentives, feedback, gamification, or smart charging as a default-setting. We conducted three focus groups with 13 EV users in Luxembourg to get first insights into which of those incentives and nudges they prefer. Preliminary results indicate that incentives and nudges should be individualized. In the future, we would use these first insights to develop a large-scale survey

DIGITALLY SOCIAL: REVIEW, SYNTHESIS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR DIGITAL SOCIAL INNOVATION

Innovation contributes to solving the grand challenges of our time. Currently, two innovation research streams coexist mostly separated, without leveraging the potential at their interface: 1) Digital innovation using the generative power of digital technologies to trigger novel, incremental and/or disruptive solutions, and 2) social innovation accelerating sustainable development. To leverage the potential of digital innovations for reaching the goals of social innovation, we aim at advancing research on digital social innovation (DSI). A comprehensive literature review reveals 78 current DSI studies. We analyse them via a theory-based multidimensional framework. In that, we bring together both research streams, identify relevant research gaps at their interface, and derive a research agenda based on eight clear-cut research questions for DSI scholars. Our findings guide advancing DSI research and enable practitioners to leverage DSI in light of the current societal challenges

Novel Insights to Facilitating Sustainability through Information Systems

This doctoral thesis consists of six research papers presented in Chapters II, III, and IV and thereby contributes to scientific knowledge in Green IS and ICT4D research. The included six research papers address topics and questions on an individual, organizational, and societal level. As such, presented models and approaches investigate how to contribute to sustainability issues occurring on all three levels. As sustainability will continue to play an essential role in the upcoming years, this doctoral thesis hopefully provides valuable theoretical and practical insights