Taking technomethodology seriously: hybrid change in the ethnomethodology–design relationship

The incorporation of ethnomethodology in professional systems development has prompted the call for the approach to move from design critique to design practice and the invention of the future. This has resulted in the development of a variety of mixing pot hybrids that have had marginal impact upon product-based development, whose needs the approach has been configured to meet. This paper suggests that a concern to fit ethnomethodology into product-based development life cycles is a primary source of the difficulties encountered in moving ethnomethodology from design critique to design practice. In practice, ethnomethodology is largely employed in research rather than product development settings. Recognition of the real-world uses of ethnomethodology in design practice opens up the possibility of devising a hybrid methodology that actively supports the invention of the future. Accordingly, this paper articulates a distinct socio-technical model that provides an iterative structure for the constructive involvement of ethnomethodology in processes of technological innovation, the results of which may subsequently be subject to the rationalities and constraints of product development.     

Web services interaction models. Current practice

Each middleware approach has one or more interaction models associated with it that determine how applications built on top of the middleware interact with each other. Message-oriented middleware (MOM) applications interact rather simply, for example, by posting messages to and retrieving messages from queues. Object-oriented middleware applications such as those based on Corba or Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) interact by invoking methods on distributed objects. Because interaction models significantly influence the types of abstractions a middleware system makes available to applications, they figure prominently in determining the breadth and variety of application integration that the middleware supports. As Web services evolve, they too will acquire standard interaction models; otherwise, their use will be limited to small-scale proprietary systems, rather than providing the standards-based "middleware for middleware" for uniting disparate islands of integration. At this point, however, the industry and standards bodies have yet to reach consensus on Web services interaction models. I consider some of the problems associated with a popular current approach to Web services interaction models     

TAPAS: A tangible End-User Development tool supporting the repurposing of Pervasive Displays

These days we are witnessing a spread of many new digital systems in public spaces featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gestures, tangible, and voice. This new user-centered paradigm — known as the NUI — aims to provide a more natural and rich experience to end users; this supports its adoption in many ubiquitous domains, as it naturally holds for Pervasive Displays: these systems are composed of variously-sized displays and support many-to-many interactions with the same public screens at the same time. Due to their public and moderated nature, users need an easy way of adapting them to heterogeneous usage contexts in order to support their long-term adoption. In this paper, we propose an End-User Development approach to this problem introducing TAPAS, a system that combines a tangible interaction with a puzzle metaphor, allowing users to create workflows on a Pervasive Display to satisfy their needs; its design and visual syntax stem from a study we carried out with designers, whose findings are also part of this work. We then carried out a preliminary evaluation of our system with second year university students and interaction designers, gathering useful feedback to improve TAPAS and employ it in many other domains.     

Cooperation without deliberation: A minimal behavior-based approach to multi-robot teams

While terminology and some concepts of behavior-based robotics have become widespread, the central ideas are often lost as researchers try to scale behavior to higher levels of complexity. “Hybrid systems” with model-based strategies that plan in terms of behaviors rather than simple actions have become common for higher-level behavior. We claim that a strict behavior-based approach can scale to higher levels of complexity than many robotics researchers assume, and that the resulting systems are in many cases more efficient and robust than those that rely on “classical AI” deliberative approaches. Our focus is on systems of cooperative autonomous robots in dynamic environments. We will discuss both claims that deliberation and explicit communication are necessary to cooperation and systems that cooperate only through environmental interaction. In this context we introduce three design principles for complex cooperative behavior—minimalism, statelessness and tolerance—and present a RoboCup soccer system that matches the sophistication of many deliberative soccer systems while exceeding their robustness, through the use of strict behavior-based techniques with no explicit communication.     

Ethnography,ethnomethodology and the problem of generalisation in design

This paper discusses the relationship between sociological theory and method, ethnomethodology and design. It argues that social science theoretical and methodological interests cannot form a basis for interdisciplinarity. Much of the argument about the relevance of ethnography for design, and more specifically about ethnomethodological enquiry, has been cast firstly as problems of method and secondly in terms of the problem of generalisation. We argue that in both instances the problem is miscast. Drawing on the arguments of Wittgenstein and Winch, we suggest that forms of generalisation are to be found in ethnomethodological enquiry and that they may be useful in design-related enquiry. We further suggest, however, that they are not the forms to be found in explanatory social science.     

Preprocessor-based variability in open-source and industrial software systems: An empirical study

Almost every sufficiently complex software system today is configurable. Conditional compilation is a simple variability-implementation mechanism that is widely used in open-source projects and industry. Especially, the C preprocessor (CPP) is very popular in practice, but it is also gaining (again) interest in academia. Although there have been several attempts to understand and improve CPP, there is a lack of understanding of how it is used in open-source and industrial systems and whether different usage patterns have emerged. The background is that much research on configurable systems and product lines concentrates on open-source systems, simply because they are available for study in the first place. This leads to the potentially problematic situation that it is unclear whether the results obtained from these studies are transferable to industrial systems. We aim at lowering this gap by comparing the use of CPP in open-source projects and industry—especially from the embedded-systems domain—based on a substantial set of subject systems and well-known variability metrics, including size, scattering, and tangling metrics. A key result of our empirical study is that, regarding almost all aspects we studied, the analyzed open-source systems and the considered embedded systems from industry are similar regarding most metrics, including systems that have been developed in industry and made open source at some point. So, our study indicates that, regarding CPP as variability-implementation mechanism, insights, methods, and tools developed based on studies of open-source systems are transferable to industrial systems—at least, with respect to the metrics we considered.     

Analysing situated interaction hazards: an activity-based awareness approach

This paper presents a case for the usefulness of activity theory (AT) for the analysis of situated interaction hazards in safety-related systems. It is suggested here that situation awareness is a safety critical attribute that is acquired and maintained through situated activity or actions. We introduce an activity-based awareness model based on this fundamental premise and we show how the model is consistent with the principles of AT. We also provide an example of the usefulness of AT as a theoretical and practical foundation for the analysis of situated interaction hazards in complex, safety-related systems. Specifically, we describe how the activity-based awareness model and AT principles were applied to an investigation of situation awareness in a military air traffic control system. We show how this approach can also be used to support analyses of general interactive systems use. We suggest that this general approach can be used to support analyses of interactive system use, to inform system design, and mitigate against the situated interaction hazards inherent in safety-related systems, and that this provides evidence that AT can be a useful way of looking at situational hazards in safety-related systems use.     

Enabling the new economic actor: data protection,the digital economy,and the Databox

This paper offers a sociological perspective on data protection regulation and its relevance to design. From this perspective, proposed regulation in Europe and the USA seeks to create a new economic actor—the consumer as personal data trader—through new legal frameworks that shift the locus of agency and control in data processing towards the individual consumer or “data subject”. The sociological perspective on proposed data regulation recognises the reflexive relationship between law and the social order, and the commensurate needs to balance the demand for compliance with the design of computational tools that enable this new economic actor. We present the Databox model as a means of providing data protection and allowing the individual to exploit personal data to become an active player in the emerging data economy.     

Innovation as Improvisation ‘In The Shadow’

In this article, we explore processes of innovation – which are inherently uncertain – from a complexity perspective, in which they are understood as new patterns of experiences as they emerge in human conversational interaction. We reflect on local interactions between people involved in emerging processes of innovation, with a particular emphasis on the improvisational nature of interaction. Through an abductive approach, by iterating actual experiences and our understanding of them, we show that such processes are collective efforts that take place as informal, highly improvised conversations — happening ‘below the radar’ — which may unpredictably offer windows of opportunity to enable change. We show that innovation often emerges as ‘shadow themes’, experienced as subversive by those involved in the moments of interaction. While these themes are embedded in informal conversations and processes, they can be induced by invitations – conscious or unconscious moves that encourage those involved to make spontaneous moves together in a mutually improvised context. Our experience shows that the emergence of shadow themes can have a long‐term impact on the organization and the people involved, and that managers may be ‘in charge but not in control’ of such innovation processes.     

High‐efficiency light‐collection optics for lamp‐based projection TV

Abstract— A new light‐collection optics has been developed that enhances the luminance of projection TV which use lamps as the light source. The conventional optical system consists of an elliptical reflector and a flat‐surface front glass, but these systems cannot sufficiently collect the beams coming from the light source, and they cause loss in the coupling with the light pipe. To solve this problem, we devised a new optical system through a structure of an aspherical reflector and an aspherical front glass. This new optical system concentrates the beams coming from the light source to a smaller point which improves the coupling efficiency. Thus, we have successfully increased the luminance of the projection TV by approximately 10%. This paper reports the design principles of the new optical system and the results of a prototype experiment.     

Supporting agile software development through active documentation

Agile development processes are adaptive rather than predictive. Therefore, agile processes emphasize operational system code rather than its documentation. To overcome the absence of comprehensive documentation artifacts, agile methods require constant interaction between the system stakeholders. Ironically, however, some traditional documentation artifacts come to support this kind of interaction. In this study, we examine the relationship between software and documentation. We develop an approach that enables incorporating domain documentation to agile development, while keeping the processes adaptive. We also provide a system design that actively uses domain knowledge documentation. These ideas have been applied through the implementation and use of agile documentation support components.     

Peek‐in‐the‐Pic: Flying Through Architectural Scenes From a Single Image*

Many casually taken ‘tourist’ photographs comprise of architectural objects like houses, buildings, etc. Reconstructing such 3D scenes captured in a single photograph is a very challenging problem. We propose a novel approach to reconstruct such architectural scenes with minimal and simple user interaction, with the goal of providing 3D navigational capability to an image rather than acquiring accurate geometric detail. Our system, Peek‐in‐the‐Pic, is based on a sketch‐based geometry reconstruction paradigm. Given an image, the user simply traces out objects from it. Our system regards these as perspective line drawings, automatically completes them and reconstructs geometry from them. We make basic assumptions about the structure of traced objects and provide simple gestures for placing additional constraints. We also provide a simple sketching tool to progressively complete parts of the reconstructed buildings that are not visible in the image and cannot be automatically completed. Finally, we fill holes created in the original image when reconstructed buildings are removed from it, by automatic texture synthesis. Users can spend more time using interactive texture synthesis for further refining the image. Thus, instead of looking at flat images, a user can fly through them after some simple processing. Minimal manual work, ease of use and interactivity are the salient features of our approach.     

Model-driven performance prediction of systems of systems

Systems of systems exhibit characteristics that pose difficulty in modelling and predicting their overall performance capabilities, including the presence of operational independence, emergent behaviour, and evolutionary development. When considering systems of systems within the autonomous defence systems context, these aspects become increasingly critical, as constraints on the performance of the final system are typically driven by hard constraints on space, weight and power. System execution modelling languages and tools permit early prediction of the performance of model-driven systems; however, the focus to date has been on understanding the performance of a model rather than determining whether it meets performance requirements, and only subsequently carrying out analysis to reveal the causes of any requirement violations. Moreover, such an analysis is even more difficult when applied to several systems cooperating to achieve a common goal—a system of systems. In this article, we propose an integrated approach to performance prediction of model-driven real-time embedded defence systems and systems of systems. Our architectural prototyping system supports a scenario-driven experimental platform for evaluating model suitability within a set of deployment and real-time performance constraints. We present an overview of our performance prediction system, demonstrating the integration of modelling, execution and performance analysis, and discuss a case study to illustrate our approach.     

Analysing interactive devices based on information resource constraints

Analysis of the usability of an interactive system requires both an understanding of how the system is to be used and a means of assessing the system against that understanding. Such analytic assessments are particularly important in safety-critical systems as latent vulnerabilities may exist which have negative consequences only in certain circumstances. Many existing approaches to assessment use tasks or scenarios to provide explicit representation of their understanding of use. These normative user behaviours have the advantage that they clarify assumptions about how the system will be used but have the disadvantage that they may exclude many plausible deviations from these norms. Assessments of how a design fails to support these user behaviours can be a matter of judgement based on individual experience rather than evidence. We present a systematic formal method for analysing interactive systems that is based on constraints rather than prescribed behaviour. These constraints capture precise assumptions about what information resources are used to perform action. These resources may either reside in the system itself or be external to the system. The approach is applied to two different medical device designs, comparing two infusion pumps currently in common use in hospitals. Comparison of the two devices is based on these resource assumptions to assess consistency of interaction within the design of each device.     

‘Long return’: A technique for improving the efficiency of inter-module communication

This paper describes a concept called ‘long return’ for use in inter-module communication systems. First an implementation which implies a simplification of—rather than an extension of—traditional inter-module communication systems is outlined. This implementation allows long returns to be used as an optimization technique without violating the commonly accepted principles of system structuring. Thereafter an experiment that provides an estimate of the improvements in efficiency of a particular operating system is described. In the SIMOS operating systems (based on the Cambridge CAP operating system) about 20 per cent of all inter-process communication operations can be avoided by using long returns, and as a consequence the amount of useful work done in the system is typically increased by about 2.0 per cent.     

Talking Work: Language-games, Organisations and Computer Supported Cooperative Work

This paper asks the question: how might CSCW system design obtain and be informed by an adequate real-world, real-time understanding of work and organisation on any occasion of work-oriented design? The problem is not a new one but foundational within contemporary research and development communities. Building on established, albeit contentious, sociological reasoning within CSCW, this paper proposes that existing approaches may be complemented through a methodological or procedural attention to the relationship between language, work and the local production of organisation. As such, this paper outlines a practical strategy or approach towards producing real-world understandings of work and organisation within the constraints of design. The approach is derived from work and lessons learnt in conducting ethnographic studies in the course of accomplishing the Dragon Project; an interdisciplinary project involved in the development of a production version prototype of a global customer service system supporting the commercial activities of a large geographically distributed shipping company.     

Creativity and evolution: a metadesign perspective

Abstract

In a world that is not predictable, improvisation and evolution are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of making it an opportunity for more creative and more sustainable solutions. User-centered and participatory design approaches have focused primarily on activities taking place at design time. These approaches have not given enough emphasis and they have provided few mechanisms to support systems as living entities that can evolve over time. Metadesign is a unique design approach concerned with opening up solution spaces rather than complete solutions (hence the prefix meta-), and aimed at creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. This approach extends the traditional notion of design beyond the original development of a system to include co-adaptive processes between users and systems that enable the users to act as designers in personally meaningful activities and be creative.     

Modular behavior-based control for team humanoids

When developing teams of humanoids — rather than an individual humanoid — there are a number of issues that become important to consider, including robustness, scalability, versatility, and also development and production costs. Therefore, we used a modern approach to AI that puts emphasis on the balance between control, electronic hardware, material, sensory system and energy in order to develop the team of Viki humanoid robots. In contrast to the top-down approach of equipping a humanoid with as many sensors, motors, power, etc., as possible, we developed a bottom-up approach to the construction of humanoids, regarding both hardware and software (modular behaviorbased control). The approach is shown with the development of the Viki humanoid team that won the RoboCup Humanoids Free Style World Championship 2002. In this paper, we focus on the main result of the behavior-based architecture with many layers of behaviors at different levels, which make it easy for both engineers to design new behaviors and for end-users to develop humanoid behaviors at different levels of complexity, dependent on the competencies of the individual end-user. With this architecture, it becomes possible to develop simple user interfaces with a user-guided implementation of our modular behavior-based approach, in order to allow any user to design performances with the humanoid robots.