Nightingallery: theatrical framing and orchestration in participatory performance

The Nightingallery project encouraged participants to converse, sing, and perform with a musically responsive animatronic bird, playfully interacting with the character while members of the public could look on and observe. We used Nightingallery to frame an HCI investigation into how people would engage with one another when confronted with unfamiliar technologies in conspicuously public, social spaces. Structuring performances as improvisational street theatre, we styled our method of exhibiting the bird character. We cast ourselves in supporting roles as carnival barkers and minders of the bird, presenting him as if he were a fantastical creature in a fairground sideshow display, allowing him the agency to shape and maintain dialogues with participants, and positioning him as the focal character upon which the encounter was centred. We explored how the anthropomorphic nature of the bird itself, along with the cultural connotations associated with the carnival/sideshow tradition helped signpost and entice participants through the trajectory of their encounters with the exhibit. Situating ourselves as secondary characters within the narrative defining the performance/use context, our methods of mediation, observation, and evaluation were integrated into the performance frame. In this paper, we explore recent HCI theories in mixed reality performance to reflect upon how genre-based cultural connotations can be used to frame trajectories of experience, and how manipulation of roles and agency in participatory performance can facilitate HCI investigation of social encounters with playful technologies.     

Learning with multi-resolution overlapping communities

A recent surge of participatory web and social media has created a new laboratory for studying human relations and collective behavior on an unprecedented scale. In this work, we study the predictive power of social connections to determine the preferences or behaviors of individuals such as whether a user supports a certain political view, whether one likes a product, whether she would like to vote for a presidential candidate, etc. Since an actor is likely to participate in multiple different communities with each regulating the actor’s behavior in varying degrees, and a natural hierarchy might exist between these communities, we propose to zoom into a network at multiple different resolutions and determine which communities reflect a targeted behavior. We develop an efficient algorithm to extract a hierarchy of overlapping communities. Empirical results on social media networks demonstrate the promising potential of the proposed approach in real-world applications.     

Involving users in the wild—Participatory product development in and with online communities

In its traditional stance, participatory design (PD) is centred on certain work/application settings and is concerned with the involvement of representative users from these contexts. Nevertheless, current web technologies enable new forms of distributed participation which might allow PD processes to be implemented in a broader and flexible way, but may at the same time raise new issues in relation to participation. In this paper, we report on a Participatory Product Development project, using social technologies, where new issues were raised—a large population of heterogeneous and globally distributed users; a range of personal and institutional purposes, and the use of these technologies in a largely untested environment. We will reflect on insights that we gathered by through observation of and participation in a software development process driven and influenced by members of an existing online community. By means of participatory observation, analysis of the use of online tools and through semi- structured interviews we identified issues around different notions of timeliness and of process structures that are related to different roles, responsibilities and levels of experience. Our results indicate that the involvement of heterogeneous users in such a context needs to be handled carefully, for the reasons we set out. The role of user representatives acting for a broader online community can become crucial when managing heterogeneity, formulating acceptable compromises and- perhaps most crucially- dealing with different professional and ‘hobbyist’ worldviews. Additionally, we found that the use of standard web technologies only partly support online participation processes. PD ‘in the wild’ needs to be better embedded in use situations and environments (e.g., by linking discussion and design space, using feedback tools, continuous reflection of the current state of development) rather than refining participatory design as a meta-process separate from use.     

Responsibly strategizing with the metaverse: Business implications and DEI opportunities and challenges

This viewpoint article aims to lay out the foundations for IS research on the strategic implications as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) opportunities and challenges of the metaverse – a sociotechnical system providing users with an immersive, synchronous 3D experience of (virtual) reality through interoperable platforms and sensor devices. We first examine the metaverse’s technologies and its underlying business models, which hold immense strategic implications for organizations and industries, and might require rethinking the future of work. As with most emerging technologies able to generate, collect, and process user data, the metaverse comes at a price; leveraging the metaverse strategically will require ethical and DEI considerations. After examining all these aspects of the metaverse, we reflect on ways IS scholarship engaged in strategizing can advance theoretical and practical knowledge by generating novel research questions and outlining a research agenda. Our contribution is twofold: first, we analyze the metaverse using a sociotechnical lens, thereby setting the ground for future studies of the phenomenon. Second, we identify specific strategic implications as well as DEI opportunities and challenges associated with the metaverse, and discuss how scholarship versed in IS strategizing can contribute to addressing them, both theoretically and empirically.     

Pastiche scenarios: Fiction as a resource for user centred design

Pastiche scenarios draw on fiction as a resource to explore the interior ‘felt-life’ aspects of user experience and the complex social and cultural issues raised by technological innovations. This paper sets out an approach for their use, outlining techniques for the location of source material and presenting three case studies of pastiche scenario use. The first case study is an evaluation of the Apple iPod that explores the socio-cultural meanings of the technology. The second case study focuses on the participatory design of Net Neighbours, an online shopping system where volunteers shop as intermediaries for older people who do not have access to computers. The third is an in depth consideration of a conceptual design, the ‘cambadge’ a wearable lightweight web cam which, upon activation broadcasts to police or public websites intended to reduce older people's fear of crime. This design concept is explored in depth in pastiche scenarios of the Miss Marple stories, A Clockwork Orange and Nineteen Eighty-four that reflect on how the device might be experienced not only by users but also by those it is used against. It is argued that pastiche scenarios are a useful complementary method for designers to reason about user experience as well as the broad social and cultural impacts of new technologies.     

IDR: A participatory methodology for interdisciplinary design in technology enhanced learning

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL’07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly multi-dimensional, design processes often lack true interdisciplinarity. To address this problem we present IDR, a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary techno-pedagogical design, drawing on the design patterns tradition [Alexander, C., Silverstein, M., & Ishikawa, S. (1977). A pattern language: Towns, buildings, construction (Center for environmental structure series). New York, NY: Oxford University Press] and the design research paradigm [DiSessa, A. A., & Cobb, P. (2004) Ontological innovation and the role of theory in design experiments. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 77–103]. We discuss the iterative development and use of our methodology by a pan-European project team of educational researchers, software developers and teachers. We reflect on our experiences of the participatory nature of pattern design and discuss how, as a distributed team, we developed a set of over 120 design patterns, created using our freely available open source web toolkit. Furthermore, we detail how our methodology is applicable to the wider community through a workshop model, which has been run and iteratively refined at five major international conferences, involving over 200 participants.     

Creating a conversational context through video blogging: A case study of Geriatric1927

Web-based communication technologies such as YouTube can provide opportunities for social contact, especially between older and younger people, and help address issues of social isolation. Currently our understanding of the dynamics of social interaction within this context (particularly for older people) is limited. Elaborating upon this understanding will make it possible to proactively facilitate and support this form of intergenerational social contact. This study focuses on the experiences of an 80-year-old video blogger (vlogger), Geriatric1927, and a video dialogue that develops between himself and three of his younger viewers on a particular topic. Through a multimodal interactional analysis, we show how vloggers create a conversational context between one another through the YouTube website. In particular we describe how vloggers use different communicative modes to establish eye contact, take turns in conversation, share embodied gestures, share their understandings and negotiate simultaneous audiences. Despite a disconnected and ambiguous sense of the other, YouTube is able to facilitate a conversational context in which common ground is shared and social contact and intergenerational communication can occur.     

Transforming society by transforming technology: the science and politics of participatory design

This article attempts to shed historical light on some of the social, political, and ethical issues that have arisen from two disparate perspectives on technology which have both come to integrate an explicit consideration of social factors into systems design. It presents two distinct historical traditions which have contributed to the current field of participatory design methodologies—Joint Application Design (JAD^®), and the British “socio-technical systems” and Scandinavian “collective resources” approaches—and which in practice integrated the end-users in different ways consequent upon their differing perspectives on workers, professional relationships to technology, and stated goals. One interest in examining the independent development of methodologies from these two perspectives is that, despite their differences, the approaches ultimately converged on a set of shared concerns and very similar practices.The paper also examines the relation of these traditions to transformations in the theorization of business organization and trends of corporate restructuring which helped to secure a place for variants of related methodologies in major US and multinational corporations. It concludes with an examination of some broader issues in the relationship between technology and society and the prospects for the critical study of technology. I argue that participatory design and its related methodologies are best understood as a model for involving users, designers and the technology itself in a process of technological development. Rather than seeing participatory design as merely the insertion of public dialog within technological design practices, as several observers have done, we should see it as a model for the critical practice of developing technological designs.     

数字技术在社科专业学术数据库建设中的应用研究——以社会科学文献出版社为例

数字技术的出现和发展推动出版行业快速转型并成为数字出版第一生产力。数据库出版物作为数字出版产品的主要形态之一,受数字技术影响深刻。本文以社会科学文献出版社数据库产品建设实例为研究对象,分析 XML 结构化碎片化加工、机器自动标引、社会科学知识采集技术、SOA 架构应用、社科知识组织体系等数字技术在数据库建设过程中的实际应用场景,提出最大化利用数字技术优化产品建设的模式与途径,推进数字技术与出版产业的深度融合发展。     

Social movement documentary practices: digital storytelling,social media and organizing

ABSTRACT

Scholars and activists have studied social movement media for its potential to challenge dominant narratives, build community relationships and create social change. This paper presents a case study of two short-form documentary projects with Black Lives Matter 5280 and the Service Employees International Union, Local 105 in Denver, Colorado to explore how collaborative media-making projects assist in building local grassroots campaigns of racial and economic justice. The communication strategies as well as the distribution efforts via online social networks and community screenings are discussed in order to analyse how documentaries rely upon personal narratives to animate members and allies’ feelings and then connect them with traditional forms of organizing like community meetings and public demonstrations. The participatory aspects of filmmaking are viewed through democratic theory, which emphasizes the social relations of citizenship and shared communal values over material and cultural resources, rather than visual aesthetics or technical processes.     

Public participation in proprietary software development through user roles and discourse

The opportunity for users to participate in design and development processes has expanded in recent years through such communication and information technologies as mailing lists, bug trackers, usage monitoring, rich interactions between users and service-center staff, remote usability testing, and so on. A key question, therefore, is deciding how to engage users in design and development through such technologies. This paper addresses this question by reviewing literature on end-user programming and open source development to develop a framework concerning user roles and discourse. The framework makes two claims: (1) user roles and a social structure emerge after the introduction of a software application (role differentiation); and (2) different roles demand different kinds of discourse for deciding what to do and for reflecting upon intended and unintended consequences (role discourse demands). To show its application, the framework is used to analyze the development of del.icio.us, a breakthrough application for social bookmarking. This development process is notable because it is a characteristic of open source software development in some respects, but the code is not made available publicly. This hybridization appears to be widely applicable and suggests how design and development processes can be structured as a service where the design and development of the system proceeds simultaneously with the formation and nurturing of a community of users.     

Tying Knots: Participatory Infrastructuring at Work

Today, most design projects are infrastructuring projects, because they build on technologies, competencies and practices that already exist. While infrastructuring was originally seen as being full of conflicts and contradictions with what is already present, we find that many contemporary reports seem to mainly address participatory infrastructuring as horizontal co-design and local, mutual learning processes in which people attempt to make the most out of available technology. In this paper we expand our view of design activities in three dimensions: First, how participatory processes play out vertically in different political and practical arenas; second, on the back stage of design, the messy activities that occur before, between and after the participatory workshops. And third, on their reach; how they tie into existing networks across organizations, and how agency and initiatives become dispersed within these networks. To illustrate and discuss the process of participatory infrastructuring we use a case study from an educational context. This particular project contains a diverse set of design activities at many organizational levels revolving around technology, decision-making, competence-building, commitment and policy-making. The project highlights these complexities, and our discussions lead to a vocabulary for participatory infrastructuring that focuses on knotworking, rather than structure, and on both horizontal and vertical reach and sustainability. This vocabulary is grounded in the meeting of the literature on infrastructuring, participatory design, and activity theory, and leads to a revised understanding of, for example, learning and conflicts in participatory infrastructuring.     

Electronic trading and the process of globalization in traditional futures exchanges: a temporal perspective

This paper develops a temporal perspective to examine information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption and processes of globalization. The foundations of our theoretical approach explicitly draw upon three intersecting planes of temporality implicit in structuration; namely reversibility, irreversibility and institutionalization. We further develop our theoretical perspective by extending the scope of structuration to incorporate temporal features of Adam's social theory on ‘global time’. We then use this temporal perspective to examine the emergence of electronic trading and the process of globalization across London and Chicago futures exchanges. Our analysis provides insights into the IT-enabled reconfiguration of these exchanges during processes of reproduction and change associated with globalization. We conclude with some key implications for e-trading strategy and consider changes in trader work life associated with the adoption of e-trading.     

Manipulating convention emergence using influencer agents

Coordination in open multi-agent systems (MAS) can reduce costs to agents associated with conflicting goals and actions, allowing artificial societies to attain higher levels of aggregate utility. Techniques for increasing coordination typically involve incorporating notions of conventions, namely socially adopted standards of behaviour, at either an agent or system level. As system designers cannot necessarily create high quality conventions a priori, we require an understanding of how agents can dynamically generate, adopt and adapt conventions during their normal interaction processes. Many open MAS domains, such as peer-to-peer and mobile ad-hoc networks, exhibit properties that restrict the application of the mechanisms that are often used, especially those requiring the incorporation of additional components at an agent or society level. In this paper, we use Influencer Agents (IAs) to manipulate convention emergence, which we define as agents with strategies and goals chosen to aid the emergence of high quality conventions in domains characterised by heterogeneous ownership and uniform levels of agent authority. Using the language coordination problem (Steels in Artif Life 2(3):319–392, 1995), we evaluate the effect of IAs on convention emergence in a population. We show that relatively low proportions of IAs can (i) effectively manipulate the emergence of high-quality conventions, and (ii) increase convention adoption and quality. We make no assumptions involving agent mechanism design or internal architecture beyond the usual assumption of rationality. Our results demonstrate the fragility of convention emergence in the presence of malicious or faulty agents that attempt to propagate low quality conventions, and confirm the importance of social network structure in convention adoption.     

Explaining social presence and the quality of online learning with the SIPS model

The concept of Social Presence is often cited by researchers trying to understand the mechanisms governing beneficial learning climates and interpersonal connections among online learners. However, convoluted definitions and problematic measurements of social presence have made it difficult to understand how exactly social presence and related social variables come to be, hindering the investigation of reliable design recommendations. This study attempts to advance the SIPS (Sociability, Social Interaction, Social Presence, Social Space) model. It shows how these variables are related to each other and to relevant outcome variables like satisfaction. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to assess the predictive capabilities of the model regarding the outcome variables. Results support the notion that a sociable learning environment fosters social interaction, leading to social presence and the emergence of a sound social space, in turn explaining the quality of the learning experience. Social presence, when measured in a non-convoluted way, has no effect on satisfaction.     

Experience to understand: a methodology for integrating users into the design for kitchen interactions

The kitchen is a place where many interactions happen every day. It is a place where new technologies and tradition meet. What makes a place a smart kitchen? This article describes our research over 29 months with a group representing typical users—we will call them the kitchen heroes. We involved them in a process of interaction design (IxD) for the kitchen following the tradition of participatory design (PD), to find out the potential of such a collaboration. We asked ourselves how could we, together with the intended users design for better, seamless interaction in the kitchen? Our research showed that designing for kitchen demands a high and consistent level of engagement of all the stakeholders if we are to design a truly smart and human-centred kitchen. How then, could we integrate them into the interaction design process? As an answer we developed a methodology for the integration of all the stakeholders into the whole design process. We focused on the early design phases and the ways to trigger engagement. The methodology we developed is named EPUI and consists of four parts: exploration, participation, understanding and integration. This article illustrates the EPUI methodology for successfully integrating kitchen users into the kitchen interaction design and fruitful participatory design. It is based on and combines benefits from methodologies such as PD, ADR, PADR, while in the article we explain how it also contributes to their flaws. Additionally, we present our lessons learned while implementing the EPUI methodology and offer tools to both seasoned and less-experienced researchers.