Some Kind of Analogtivity: anti-simulation through design

This paper discusses and explores issues surrounding current approaches to the design of technological products and offers two critical design proposals for presentation and debate. Primarily driven by contemporary theoretical writings and thoughts on the subject of ‘technology’ and ‘simulation’, currently being offered by leading thinkers on these subjects and expressed as ‘technological objects’; they are the result of a critical investigation into the emerging design issues surrounding ‘interaction’ and ‘transparency’. By using ‘popular’ language of product design as a vehicle, they exist as ‘cultural offerings’ exploring an alternative future for technological products not necessarily governed by science and economics.     

Interconnection blocks with minimal dead volumes permitting planar interconnection to thin microfluidic devices

We have previously described ‘Interconnection Blocks’ which are re-usable, non-integrated PDMS blocks which allowing multiple, aligned and planar microfluidic interconnections. Here, we describe Interconnection Block versions with zero dead volumes that allow fluidic interfacing to flat or thin side-walled microfluidic devices. These designs increase the number of materials, types of devices and applications for which Interconnection Blocks can be used. Average leak pressures of 4.7 bar were recorded and all individual leak pressures recorded were above the 2-bar threshold for microfluidic applications. Additionally, the new Interconnection Block designs demonstrate that micromilling, a practical microfabrication method, can produce useful geometries not readily made through clean room-based approaches.     

From human-centred to human-context centred approach: looking back over ‘the hills’, what has been gained and lost?

The cornerstone of the human-centred tradition lies in two notions: socially useful production and human machine symbiosis. However, only the latter became in focus in the successive user-centred design approaches. The paper makes a critical ‘flash-back’ to various human centred design approaches since the 1970s. In addition, it explores the sustainability challenges facing the current situation and suggests that ‘human-centredness’ should be extended to ‘human-context centred’ approach in order to recognize the challenges of the sustainability. Finally, the paper discuss the possibilities to develop and use narrative and modelling simulation methods including both qualitative and quantitative tools in a combined approach to meet the challenges of sustainable development within such a human-context centred approach.     

Socio-Technical and Soft Approaches to Information Requirements Elicitation in the Post-Methodology Era

The contributors to this special issue focus on socio-technical and soft approaches to information requirements elicitation and systems development. They represent a growing body of research and practice in this field. This review presents an overview and analysis of the salient themes within the papers encompassing their common underlying framework, the methodologies and tools and techniques presented, the organisational situations in which they are deployed and the issues they seek to address. It will be argued in the review that the contributions to this special edition exemplify the ‘post-methodological era’ and the ‘contingency approaches’ from which it is formed.     

Effective Communication in Requirements Elicitation: A Comparison of Methodologies

The elicitation or communication of user requirements comprises an early and critical but highly error-prone stage in system development. Socially oriented methodologies provide more support for user involvement in design than the rigidity of more traditional methods, facilitating the degree of user–designer communication and the ‘capture’ of requirements. A more emergent and collaborative view of requirements elicitation and communication is required to encompass the user, contextual and organisational factors. From this accompanying literature in communication issues in requirements elicitation, a four-dimensional framework is outlined and used to appraise comparatively four different methodologies seeking to promote a closer working relationship between users and designers. The facilitation of communication between users and designers is subject to discussion of the ways in which communicative activities can be ‘optimised’ for successful requirements gathering, by making recommendations based on the four dimensions to provide fruitful considerations for system designers.     

How Can I Help You? Call Centres,Classification Work and Coordination

As a comparatively novel but increasingly pervasive organizational arrangement, call centres have been a focus for much recent research. This paper identifies lessons for organizational and technological design through an examination of call centres and ‘classification work’ – explicating what Star [1992, Systems/Practice vol. 5, pp. 395–410] terms the ‘open black box’. Classification is a central means by which organizations standardize procedure, assess productivity, develop services and re-organize their business. Nevertheless, as Bowker and Star [1999, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge MA: MIT Press] have pointed out, we know relatively little about the work that goes into making classification schema what they are. We will suggest that a focus on classification ‘work’ in this context is a useful exemplar of the need for some kind of ‘meta-analysis’ in ethnographic work also. If standardization is a major ambition for organizations under late capitalism, then comparison might be seen as a related but as-yet unrealized one for ethnographers. In this paper, we attempt an initial cut at a comparative approach, focusing on classification because it seemed to be the primary issue that emerged when we compared studies. Moreover, if technology is the principal means through which procedure and practice is implemented and if, as we believe, classifications are becoming ever more explicitly embedded within it (for instance with the development of so-called ‘semantic web’ and associated approaches to ontology-based design), then there is clearly a case for identifying some themes which might underpin classification work in a given domain.     

Agile Project Management: A Case Study of a Virtual Research Environment Development Project

In this paper we use a case study of a project to create a Web 2.0-based, Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for researchers to share digital resources in order to reflect on the principles and practices for embedding eResearch applications within user communities. In particular, we focus on the software development methodologies and project management techniques adopted by the project team in order to ensure that the project remained responsive to changing user requirements without compromising their capacity to keep the project ‘on track’, i.e. meeting the goals declared in the project proposal within budget and on time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how the project team, whose members are distributed across multiple sites (and often mobile), exploit a repertoire of coordination mechanisms, communication modes and tools, artefacts and structuring devices as they seek to establish the orderly running of the project while following an agile, user-centred development approach.     

Materials with computational experience and style

This paper discusses the design of materials that utilize embedded computational techniques to demonstrate the capacity to learn, adapt and develop responsive behaviors that are shaped over time. The focus is on materials that develop time-based relationships based on a level of ‘experience’ they accumulate from long-term interaction with their users and environment. Materials with ‘computational experience’ are demonstrated with two designs: an interactive rocking chair that utilizes its material properties and computational abilities to manage its own energy production and consumption while providing physical and mental exercises to its user; and an LED-based, reconfigurable display that adjusts its content based on its interaction with its user while monitoring its internal conditions, environmental factors and usage. These examples are used to discuss the design of computational ‘styles’ for materials that would not only allow them to express signature characteristics embedded in their physical properties and computational behavior but also function as features that would evolve in response to interaction patterns and accumulated experiences. Throughout the paper, behavior-driven material practices are presented and their potential to influence the look, feel and functionalities of products and spaces are discussed.     

Addressing privacy requirements in system design: the PriS method

A major challenge in the field of software engineering is to make users trust the software that they use in their every day activities for professional or recreational reasons. Trusting software depends on various elements, one of which is the protection of user privacy. Protecting privacy is about complying with user’s desires when it comes to handling personal information. Users’ privacy can also be defined as the right to determine when, how and to what extend information about them is communicated to others. Current research stresses the need for addressing privacy issues during the system design rather than during the system implementation phase. To this end, this paper describes PriS, a security requirements engineering method, which incorporates privacy requirements early in the system development process. PriS considers privacy requirements as organisational goals that need to be satisfied and adopts the use of privacy-process patterns as a way to: (1) describe the effect of privacy requirements on business processes; and (2) facilitate the identification of the system architecture that best supports the privacy-related business processes. In this way, PriS provides a holistic approach from ‘high-level’ goals to ‘privacy-compliant’ IT systems. The PriS way-of-working is formally defined thus, enabling the development of automated tools for assisting its application.

A designerly critique on enchantment

To develop the concept of user experience in HCI, McCarthy et al. introduce the notion of enchantment in interaction design. They describe five sensibilities that support exploration and evaluation in design for enchantment. In this paper, we discuss design for enchantment in light of our approach to design for interaction, called design for meaningful mediation. Based on our experiences from case studies, we argue that ‘considering the whole person with feelings, desires and anxieties’, one of the sensibilities McCarthy et al. formulate, influences the desirability and realisation of the other four sensibilities. By way of case studies, we show how we explored the link between ‘the whole person’ and desired interaction experience in a designerly way. We place enchantment in a context of other interaction experiences and demonstrate possible design techniques relevant to design for interaction experiences, including enchantment.     

Remote Collaboration Over Video Data: Towards Real-Time e-Social Science

The design of distributed systems to support collaboration among groups of scientists raises new networking challenges that grid middleware developers are addressing. This field of development work, ‘e-Science’, is increasingly recognising the critical need of understanding the ordinary day-to-day work of doing research to inform design. We have investigated one particular area of collaborative social scientific work – the analysis of video data. Based on interviews and observational studies, we discuss current practices of social scientific work with digital video in three areas: Preparation for collaboration; Control of data and application; and Annotation configurations and techniques. For each, we describe how these requirements feature in our design of a distributed video analysis system as part of the MiMeG project: our security policy and distribution; the design of the control system; and providing freeform annotation over data. Finally, we review our design in light of initial use of the software between project partners; and discuss how we might transform the spatial configuration of the system to support annotation behaviour.     

Antisedentary Beigeless Computing

Conclusion Four decades of sporadic invention and experimentation of and with non-traditional human-computer interface schemes have congealed (somewhat abruptly though not without a few clear-sighted antecedents) into a new field of information system design, here calledAntisedentary Beigeless Computing, that consciously rejects the traditional conception of isolated tete-a-tete between the human and the box-CRT-keyboardmouse. ABC systems instead favour the complementary directions away from this notion of an immobile info-shrine: more personal, intimate, and portable information access; and more diffuse, environmentally-integrated information access. Consideration of ABC projects to date seems to suggest that no single instance can alone express the full generality required of a ‘working’ information system, so that (on the one hand) system design must acknowledge that a complex set of trade-offs involving capabilities, universality, specificity, personalization, and generality is inescapable; while (on the other hand) an ideal, eventual ‘information environment’ will inevitably comprise the careful interweaving of some number of individual ABC systems. Taxonomies and classification schema can rarely hope to be found complete or flawless before the collection of items that they purport to describe have themselves reached the evolutionary stasis of ‘adulthood’ — that is, there is typically some threshold of development or growth beyond which few enough surprises lurk that an encompassing taxonomy can be constructed and observed to reliably encompass, in the longer term. The domain of ABC thought is still quite nascent, and so we would be foolish to assume that all its extremities of form and connotation are now visible, but to the extent that we can already see the outlines of a ‘field’ it is reasonable to make a first run at an analytic taxonomy. The ‘independent character axes’ approach presented here seems broad and loose enough to accommodate any number of additions to the basic stable of ABC systems. It is, further, a taxonomy amenable to significant revision as may be found necessary: axes can be added, deleted, reconstrued, etc. as time and consideration clarify our understanding of ABC. However, it should also be anticipated that the field will eventually coalesce around a much smaller number of better-defined ‘axes’ and thus permit taxonomic reversion to the more hierarchical (and finally more satisfying) ‘Linnean’ scheme we'd originally imagined establishing.     

Scenario Development and Practical Decision Making under Uncertainty: Application to Requirements Engineering

In this paper, we address the question of how flesh and blood decision makers manage the combinatorial explosion in scenario development for decision making under uncertainty. The first assumption is that the decision makers try to undertake ‘robust’ actions. For the decision maker a robust action is an action that has sufficiently good results whatever the events are. We examine the psychological as well as the theoretical problems raised by the notion of robustness. Finally, we address the false feeling of decision makers who talk of ‘risk control’. We argue that ‘risk control’ results from the thinking that one can postpone action after nature moves. This ‘action postponement’ amounts to changing look-ahead reasoning into diagnosis. We illustrate these ideas in the framework of software development and examine some possible implications for requirements analysis.     

Wiki-supported collaborative learning in primary education: How a dialogic space is created for thinking together

This paper explores how wikis may be used to support primary education students’ collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can be characterised. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the collaborative processes of students working together in a wiki environment, in order to see how primary students can actively create a shared context for learning in the wiki. Educational literature has already reported that wikis may support collaborative knowledge-construction processes, but in our study we claim that a dialogic perspective is needed to accomplish this. Students must develop an intersubjective orientation towards each others’ perspectives, to co-construct knowledge about a topic. For this purpose, our project utilised a ‘Thinking Together’ approach to help students develop an intersubjective orientation towards one another and to support the creation of a ‘dialogic space’ to co-construct new understanding in a wiki science project. The students’ asynchronous interaction process in a primary classroom—which led to the creation of a science text in the wiki—was analysed and characterised, using a dialogic approach to the study of CSCL practices. Our results illustrate how the Thinking Together approach became embedded within the wiki environment and in the students’ collaborative processes. We argue that a dialogic approach for examining interaction can be used to help design more effective pedagogic approaches related to the use of wikis in education and to equip learners with the competences they need to participate in the global knowledge-construction era.     

False Requirements Express Real Needs

Requirements Engineering for airing readers’ views on requirements engineering research and practice. Contributions that describe results, experiences, biases and research agendas in requirements engineering are particularly welcome. ‘Viewpoints’ is an opportunity for presenting technical correspondence or subjective arguments. So, whether you are a student, teacher, researcher or practitioner, get on your soapbox today and let us know what’s on your mind . . . Please submit contributions electronically to Viewpoints Editor, Bashar Nuseibeh (ban@doc.ic.ac.uk). Contributions less than 2000 words in length are preferred.     

An evaluative study on ESO and SIMP for optimising a cantilever tie—beam

We examine both the evolutionary structural optimisation (ESO) and solid isotropic microstructure with penalisation (SIMP) methodologies by investigating a cantilever tie–beam. Initially, both ESO and SIMP produce designs with higher objective function values relative to a previously published ‘intuitive’ design. However, after careful investigation of the numerical parameters such as the initial design domain and the mesh size, both methods obtain designs that have lower objective function values relative to the intuitive design. Thus, a clearer understanding of the numerical parame- ters and their influence on optimisation methods is achieved.     

A pseudo-sensitivity based discrete-variable approach to structural topology optimization with multiple materials

An algorithm has been developed which uses material as a discrete variable in multi-material topology optimization and thus provides an alternative to traditional methods using material interpolation and level-set approaches. The algorithm computes ‘pseudo-sensitivities’ of the objective and constraint functions to discrete material changes. These are used to rank elements, based on which a fraction of elements are selected for material ID modification during the optimization iteration. The algorithm is of general applicability and avoids frequent matrix factorizations so that it is applicable to large structural problems. In addition to the conventionally used evolutionary and morphogenesis approaches for iteration, a new iteration scheme of ‘resubstitution’ which combines the two approaches is presented. The application and functioning of the algorithm is demonstrated through case studies and comparisons with a few benchmark problems, showing its capability in providing mass-optimal topologies under stiffness constraints for various structural problems where multiple materials are considered.     

Design,Implementation and Testing of a Vision System for Small Unmanned Vertical Take off and Landing Vehicles with Strict Payload Limitations

Alternative designs of a simple, low cost and effective vision system for small, portable, unmanned aerial vertical take off and landing (VTOL) vehicles are presented. Design configurations follow the ‘on-board’ and ‘on-the-ground’ processing concept and they depend on very strict payload limitations and power supply restrictions. Hardware and software components for both designs are described; advantages and disadvantages of both alternatives are compared; computational complexity is calculated and trade offs are discussed. Implementations on a series of small unmanned VTOL vehicles as well as testing details are included and experimental results are presented.     

Tangibles for learning: a representational analysis of physical manipulation

Manipulatives—physical learning materials such as cubes or tiles—are prevalent in educational settings across cultures and have generated substantial research into how actions with physical objects may support children’s learning. The ability to integrate digital technology into physical objects—so-called ‘digital manipulatives’—has generated excitement over the potential to create new educational materials. However, without a clear understanding of how actions with physical materials lead to learning, it is difficult to evaluate or inform designs in this area. This paper is intended to contribute to the development of effective tangible technologies for children’s learning by summarising key debates about the representational advantages of manipulatives under two key headings: offloading cognition—where manipulatives may help children by freeing up valuable cognitive resources during problem solving, and conceptual metaphors—where perceptual information or actions with objects have a structural correspondence with more symbolic concepts. The review also indicates possible limitations of physical objects—most importantly that their symbolic significance is only granted by the context in which they are used. These arguments are then discussed in light of tangible designs drawing upon the authors’ current research into tangibles and young children’s understanding of number.