Planning travel as everyday design

This paper examines the implications of conceptualising planning as a type of design activity. This is explored through results from a two-month field study that investigated the planning and decision making behaviour of people engaged in preparing for multipoint, international air travel. Planning travel is a type of ill-structured complex problem that is characterised as being temporally sporadic, sometimes synchronous, often asynchronous, frequently collaborative, and spatially varied with participants at different times co-located and in separate places. Research participants were professional travel agents and non-professional but experienced travel planners. Ancillary material collected included photographs of the planning situation and drawings and notes made by participants. In contrast to the formalised prescriptive planning models common in cognitive science and operations research, the everyday planning activity featured in this study is situated and naturalistic. This research is undertaken with a view to designing systems to support the design and decision making activity of travel planners. Copyright the author(s) and CHISIG

A study of email and SMS use in rural Indonesia

This paper describes a two-year research study that piloted and evaluated the use of low-cost, low-bandwidth Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support meetings between agricultural researchers and farmers in rural Indonesia and researchers in Australia. We found that the primary constraints to ICT use in rural Indonesia are rarely technical, but rather relate to the knowledge, social and economic systems within which they are used. This study revealed how different local appropriations of email and mobile phone SMS clash, which often resulted in misunderstanding, frustration and reduced team cohesion and performance. This research contributes to understanding the role of ICT to enhance social inclusion of those in remote parts of developing countries. © ACM 2009

Low-cost, low-bandwidth online meetings between farmers and scientists

This paper presents aspects of a nine year research activity into the use of low-cost, low-bandwidth Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support online meetings between farmers and scientists in rural Australia. It discusses the use of Microsoft NetMeeting" (NM) to support these meetings, and describes the social and technical conditions under which these tools are likely to be useful and used

Remote participatory prototyping enabled by emerging social technologies

Remote participatory prototyping is characterised by extended periods of engagement, working directly with participants in the context of real-world problem settings, and by the use of social technologies. This paper reports a prototyping activity that aimed to design web-based software, over a three-month period, to support people's 'everyday' travel planning. Participants were supported in creating software prototypes in the context of their real-world travel activities. The aim was to gain insight into the phenomena of unstructured, ad-hoc, planning as it occurs in the context of everyday life, as opposed to the deliberative, structured planning processes that are common in organisational contexts. This research examined the process of remote prototyping as a design method, enabled by social technologies. Remote participatory prototyping was used to support three concurrent activities: the design of a new software artefact; the use of the prototype as a means to gain insight into a social phenomena; and a cyclical process of reflective discussion that constituted a mutual learning activity between researchers and research participants. © 2012 ACM