Bioinspired scattering materials: light transport in anisotropic, disordered systems

The study of light propagation in disordered media has attracted the interest of many researchers for its relevance to fundamental and applied problems, ranging from imaging through turbid media to the fabrication of white paint. Scattering in a disordered system is determined by the spatial distribution and the scattering properties of its building blocks. To date, most efforts on scattering optimisation have focused on isotropic, high refractive index systems. This thesis investigates the importance of anisotropy in increasing the scattering efficiency of a system, with a particular focus on low refractive index media and their use as sustainable, white materials. Nature provides a striking example of how to exploit anisotropy to achieve scattering optimisation: with the intra-scale chitin network of the beetle genus Cyphochilus. In this thesis, after showing that this network exhibits the highest scattering efficiency found in nature thus far, a systematic numerical investigation was performed to understand the importance of both single-particle and structural anisotropy in scattering optimisation. In particular, this numerical analysis unveiled that ensembles of anisotropic particles show higher reflectance compared to their isotropic counterpart, whilst using less material. Based on these findings, the optical properties of bioinspired, scattering systems — obtained both via polymer phase separation and a combination of sequential vacuum filtration and freeze-drying — were investigated. Notably, the reported materials achieve scattering properties comparable to those found in nature, showcasing the potential of using biopolymers to produce sustainable, biocompatible white materials. In addition, the presented bioinspired systems are an interesting platform for fundamental studies, allowing to investigate light transport in anisotropic media.European Research Council grant awarded to Dr Silvia Vignolin

SOCIAL PRACTICE DESIGN (SPD), PATHOS, IMPROVISATION, MOOD, AND BRICOLAGE: THE MEDITERRANEAN WAY TO MAKE PLACE FOR IT?

Our proposal for Social Practice Design (SPD), i.e., the design of social practices – in itself a social design activity -, seeks to ensure that the potential benefits of envisioned novel technologies can be realized, by increasing the bias towards the social in Information Systems Development (ISD). SPD is a form of intervention research or action research based on counselling. It can be considered an extension of Participatory Design (PD) approaches to the implementation phase of information systems. It regards the concept and participative introduction of new things to do, or of new ways to do things, by humans, in order to make place for technology (Ehn 2006), and in order to resolve a variety of other pending social problems in organisations. In this paper we present SPD as a fully phenomenology-based approach, we reason about its stand in the IS discipline, and we briefly describe and point to an application for a European research project. What characterize our position in defining SPD are Claudio Ciborra’s Pathos, Improvisation, Caretaking, Bricolage, and other key concepts he puts forth in order to shift the ISD focus from ‘method’, and direct it ‘on human existence and everyday life’ (Ciborra 2002). We are motivated in this choice by the quest for more impact of ISD research on ISD practice, and our belief that phenomenology and counselling are the right recipe ingredients for this. The approach of Social Practice Design is based on the idea that problem solutions are in the hands of the organisation’s personnel, and that person centred counselling approaches are capable of empowering them and support them to success. It is well known that social practices cannot be ‘engineered’ but that they are evolving as part of people’s activities of integrating a new technology into their ways of doing. Using the word ‘design’ we wish to stress intentionality, proactiveness, creativity and planning as necessary ingredients of organisational innovation processes; i.e., we underline the usefulness of the cognition of the necessity of a conscious design approach to the development of innovative social practices. Thus, our choice of an oxymoron in the SPD title. In structure, SPD is similar to any methodology for the social, i.e., it includes multiple perspectives into the usual triad of scientific paradigms: observation, analysis, and synthesis. Its core actions reside in the two basic phases of the ‘design’ approach for innovating social practices: • an ethnographic analysis phase to identify outstanding problems in the area of social practice • a creative design phase for developing social practice innovations We judge the quality of the SPD approach by three requirements (Baskerville and Myers 2004): a contribution to practice (the action), a contribution to research (the theory), the criteria by which to judge the research, and we show explicitly how the research in the case meets these criteria

DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING ELEVATES THE INNOVATION DESIGN OF A PAEDIATRIC CLINIC FROM MEDIA TO INTERSUBJECTIVE DIALOGUE

We investigate the innovations actually enacted in an organisational research intervention, to identify double loop learning instances, as a counsellor-facilitator engages in therapeutic co-construction with the client. The case is situated in a paediatric clinic for children with developmental differences. Ethnography lasted three month of full immersion of the researcher-facilitator-counsellor. Followed by a co-construction process between counsellor and client to let emerge innovation design ideas. A number of double loop learning instances came to modify the practice culture of the clinic. Outstanding was the focus emerged on the intersubjective dialogue as the key element to boost impact of relational emotional interaction experiences with the child and with the parent. Other crisp concepts include attention to: breakdown in the relation with parents; dead or live speech as intentional communication style used with parents; more articulated and structured treatment notes reporting therapy sessions; first and second order cybernetic assessments; plus a variety of advices. The onset of focus on intersubjective dialogue, to further develop the clinical practice, the most striking outcome, contributed by the client. The impulse applied to therapist training, its greatest consequence. Significative the thrust towards assessing impact and nature of the clinical practice

A SECOND STEP BACK FOR MANAGING AMBIGUITY BESIDES REDUCING UNCERTAINTY

This paper is an attempt to chronicle and evaluate the struggle to innovate, to understand and to produce a sustainable response to the pressing problems of the care and protection of an aging population. In that struggle, quite distinct world views of the lived experience of the older person and their families and carers, the pressures and challenges of practitioners, on managers and planners and on the politicians who strive to improve the experience of life of their constituents and the desire of technicians to design and build something useful and interesting come together not in a rational orchestration of interests but in the agonistics of real life. The reality of the distinction between what we have called North-South, hierarchical. and East-West, peer and partnership behaviours and attitudes, between Gregory Bateson’s distinctions of first order and second order processes and deutero versus acquisitive learning together with the need to support and nurture sense making and co-production are very apparent in the experience of the project. The challenges of maintaining an appropriate balance have been significant and are ongoing. We have tried to describe, and provide some detailed evidence for, a style of intervention which we have claimed takes a step further than what is usually conceived of as participative design. This is not based on a reallocation of rights and capabilities between architect/designers and client/users in what are still linear or iterative but two sided design processes. Such reallocations still leave the definition of the objectives and the contexts of development as preconditions of design and assume that the architectural language and conceptual framework are available to the participants in which the problem and the solution can be articulated. In circumstances where these assumptions cannot be safely made, there is a need for an intervention which has the purpose of addressing this lack. In our classification of development processes, this necessarily implies the creation of what we have called East-West occasions which are furnished with material, exhibits and provocations around which the participants can engage with each other in sense making and the co-construction of a shared language

NOW: THE PARTICIPATORY MARKETPLACE FOR A TOURIST DESTINATION

Framing metamorphosis: In a unique, bottom-up, destination management case - exploiting mobileinternet based communication – operators’ competition is washed out, in favour of shared sense making, cooperation, and coordination. How is it possible? What are the drivers, enablers, and success factors? What makes it sustainable? What produces shared self-awareness in the community, to gain group access to online trade? What magic organisational intervention produces the “miracle”? Different perspectives: Qualitative analysis interpretation, in a soft, participated, action-case, yields: from a socio-technical perspective: local dimension and participation (sustainability of solution, convenience; a working online market; putting the tourist at centre); from a social perspective: adapt to various users\u27 situation (location, context, and mood; don’t take all, select on quality; crossmarketing partnership); from an IS discipline perspective: social-practice-design intervention; mobile- Internet driven business-model and cooperation; APPs and user configurability. Theory stands: Digging into the conceptual fabrics of the case, unquestionably unveils the embodiment of some anticipated, crisp, phenomenology-based IS concepts, in the social structuration back-bones of human behaviour of NOW: i) personal sense making and motivation (situation, context and mood, convenience, sustainability); ii) people participation to technology-based innovation (participatory-design, constructing well functioning socio-technical infrastructures, user-design in use); iii) intervention for consensus-based, organizational change by social-practice-design (facilitation for shared sense making, trust and cooperation building, bottom-up governance)

HERDING CATS: OR MODEL-BASED ALIGNMENT OF HETEROGENEOUS PRACTICES

This paper reports on a study of how practitioners in engineering design try to develop and use models of the design space of the enterprise in support of collaborative work within global production networks. The paper also examines the difficulties they face in developing these models

Antecedents of success in IS offshoring projects - Proposal for an empirical research study

The paper presents a research model and a measurement instrument for a research-in-progress study on the antecedents of success in IS offshoring projects. In this empirical-confirmatory study, we intend to analyse the impact of the constructs “offshoring expertise”, “trust in offshore service provider”, “project suitability”, “knowledge transfer”, and “liaison quality” on offshore project success. Constructs and indicators are derived from an extensive literature review. We plan to formulate a structural equation model and to test it using partial least squares (PLS) as an analysis technique. Our research model addresses the paucity of research that quantitatively examines offshoring success

APPLYING LESSONS LEARNED FROM COUNSELLING: ON NURTURING RELATIONS IN E-GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

This paper elaborates on the relevance of deploying focus and effort on personal relation, in interventions for organisational innovation. Supporting the establishment of sense making and trust with Social Practice Design (SPD) approaches is found to be of primary importance in an e- Government development project. Here regional employees user-design a computer-based aid for public tender editing – a tender configurator - with the support of facilitators. The paper offers a demonstration of the mission critical relevance of the relational component in SPD, intertwined with the customary functional component, in resuming governance towards project success. We address the structural problem with infra-structural measures including open conversations to promote shared understanding, and user design laboratories to promote concept emergence and learning, while practicing relation and trust building all along. Our constructivist approach renounces from the start to solve the governance problem within a narrow managerial perspective. This experience is far from a complete experiment. But a wealth of indications and partial results have been harvested on needs, opportunities, and practices, for promoting shared understanding and trust in the project, and letting emerge idiosyncratic solutions. Our SPD approach is entrenched in the deployment of facilitator interventions in the case site, in an action research (AR) like approach employing Interactive Use Cases (IUC) as a Participative Design (PD) tool. Key is the awareness and intentionality in conceiving, proposing, co-constructing with users the appropriate path, in the context, towards desired change. A holistic, long-term commitment. Quality of the path more important, that the very goal. The SPD approach is evolved through: a) the attempts from facilitators to build up personal relations of trust with managers and personnel; b) ethnographic observations; c) the analysis and awareness creation of the main traits of the extant situation in the company, through interviews, meetings, and workshops; d) the joint identification with the company’s personnel of the crucial how question e) the conception and joint co-construction of visions of solution by personnel and facilitators. PD techniques employed as special measures include: user laboratories, learning sessions, design sessions. We judge the quality of the SPD approach by three requirements (Baskerville and Myers 2004): a contribution to practice (the action), a contribution to research (the theory), the criteria by which to judge the research, and we show explicitly how the research in the case meets these criteria