On the links between employment, partnership quality, and the desire to have a first child

We examine the impact of precarious work (low income and job security satisfaction) on the intention to have a first child. We consider a direct and an indirect effect; the latter is mediated by partners’ conflict behaviour, conflict level, and partnership quality. We assume that a satisfactory partnership is positively associated with the intention to have a first child. The analyses are based on a subsample of the German Generations and Gender Survey. For men we found a direct effect of income and an indirect effect of job security satisfaction on childbearing intentions, whereas for women no direct and only a weak indirect impact of precarious work could be observed.employment, fertility, partnerships

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

Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study

Supporting the Formation of Communities of Practice: Urban Planning in the MR-Tent

We have developed a prototype of an integrated framework of tools, an MR application supporting a range of devices for collaborative multimodal interaction and individual expression. These tools allow groups of stakeholders in an urban project create and manipulate visual and auditory scenes, and mesh these scenes with the real environment of an urban planning site as an integral part of expressing and experiencing an evolving project. The technical infrastructure is housed in a specifically designed MR Tent (Figure 1), which allows bringing technologies that are normally available only in laboratory settings to the site of an urban project. On top of designing these tools in a user-centered design process, we have also developed an approach to supporting multiple interactions among the various agents (professionals, as well as lay people, referring to different temporal and spatial scales, representing various cultures) in real complex urban environments. We contend that when introducing participatory technologies, methods are needed that facilitate the constitution of multidisciplinary teams founded on public-private and local actors-global operators partnerships [Bourdin et al. 2006]

Orte des Gestapoterrors im heutigen Niedersachsen

Auszug aus dem Antrag im MWK-Förderprogramm Pro*Niedersachsen – Kulturelles Erbe – Sammlungen und ObjekteExcerpt from a funding proposal to the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony

FACILITATING CO-CONSTRUCTION BY SOCIAL PRACTICE DESIGN: A CASE OF GEODISTRIBUTED EMPLOYEES FACING THE DESIGN OF MODEL-BASED ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

This paper describes the experiences of practicing social practice design (SPD) activities with user groups, in geographically distributed, collaborating manufacturing companies, struggling with the introduction of model based enterprise systems. Within a European project, we observed and routinely analyzed ongoing development and assessment work of model based technologies and methodologies, in these companies. Based on an ethnographic study of Modelling sessions and Validation sessions, we performed an in depth analysis of people semantic and pragmatic perspectives (a necessary and needed ‘second step back’), and identified core disconnects on modelling concept use and language, and on motivations and goals, between technology designers – modellers - and domain experts – users - clearly hindering project progress -. These disconnects were addressed with user groups in the form of SPD sessions (‘second order’ activities), which consisted mostly in a series of design game and scenario-building workshops, enriched by open conversations and perspective sharing and comparison. The paper describes how these SPD sessions facilitated the creation of sense making and trust, enabling participants to engage and learn, and to act as change agents in the project, opening the way to co-construction of solutions with other actors. Observations of Modelling and Validation sessions showed that participants could not automatically build on a deep understanding of modelling and its trade-offs; they adopted the representational conventions they had learned to use. Lack of sense making and lack of co-construction were observed, along with lack of facilitation for genuinely participative conditions. Modeller-guided Modelling sessions showed no appropriation of object decomposition and relationship structures by domain experts, nor contribution from users to leadership in the modelling process; only imposition of hierarchical structures by modellers, in the midst of a cloud of mistrust and suspicion. Validation sessions of the model-based approach showed that ‘common’ users do not perceive the value of the approach, as they have not been helped to gain a conceptual understanding of modelling, of the tradeoffs of abstractions, and of how a model may productively interact with work practices. In this distributed project, different concepts of various user groups all conflicted with modellers’ concept. The SPD facilitation interventions helped participants in stepping back from the “official view” of the work process created in the course of the project, and in focussing more on their own experiences, opening up for creativity. SPD events were grounded in the belief that, when it comes to one’s own things, people with no special knowledge of the issues to be discussed can contribute something valuable, especially on those matters that they perceive as problems for themselves; it was impressive to witness how people with no management perspective can engage in strategy development within a very short time. The methods were easy enough to adopt without much preparation and rich enough to stimulate learning and valuable insights; people felt comfortable and not at risk at being judged. Participants expressed how important the experience of working creatively on solving “real problems” had been for them. We can understand this also as a result of the longitudinal character of our SPD engagement with people in the project, which had provided us with good knowledge about work practices, potentials and problems on the one hand, allowed trust building on the other hand