Massive Re-Patterning of the Urban Landscape

Gaming is normally seen as a way to escape reality; but could its open-source tools be used to shape the physical environment? Architect, programmer and game designer Jose Sanchez has created the Block'hood video game as an urban simulation, with users assembling city blocks to design a community. Emerging patterns are tested against ecological and energy concerns. The outcomes both increase public understanding of these issues and present the possibility of a dialogue-based alternative to top-down masterplanning.     

Co-producing,curating, and defining design knowledge in an online practitioner community

ABSTRACT

As co-design and other participatory design practices increasingly make design outcomes more accessible to everyday citizens, it is also important to understand how designers negotiate the value of design knowledge that undergirds design action and share this knowledge within their own community to facilitate and evolve their practices. In this study, we analyze UX practitioners’ interactions on Reddit, including patterns of resource sharing and curation that point towards a collective construction of UX as a design discipline. We identified how knowledge from diverse sources was selected and shared with the subreddit community (co-production); the resources that community members engaged with and to what extent (curation); and the collective body of knowledge that characterised the design community (definition of design knowledge). We found that boundary work that sought to define the value of UX knowledge often took place at the periphery of shared resources, either expanding or rearticulating the boundary of UX knowledge in relation to trends in employment and nascent professionalisation. Implications of this work for the co-creation of knowledge to support design practices are considered, focusing on how design knowledge concomitantly shapes and is shaped by client-directed design action.     

Examining user perceptions of smartwatch through dynamic topic modeling

Since the 2010s, various companies have begun to manufacture wearable smartwatch devices, but the current sales of these products are not impressive. This study investigates how the limitations of the smartwatch are related to perceptual discomforts. Theoretically, this study evaluates the claim that the discomfort that users appear to have with the smartwatch stem from failed remediation. Users perceive the smartwatch more as a set of functional sensors rather than a watch or smartphone. Specifically, from the remediation perspective, the authors asked how users perceive the functions of the smartwatch. This study used dynamic topic modeling for topics on the smartwatch on Reddit. This study reports that the smartwatch has failed to provide a proper way to use the remediated content that it provides. Suggestions for future studies are addressed.     

Predicting continuity of online conversations on Reddit

Online conversation has been facilitating human society, which has encouraged people not only to share news, products, or daily events, but also to develop ideas. A popular type of online conversation is threaded conversation, where a person initiates a conversation with a new topic by uploading a post, then others reply to the post or the comments made by other participants in a recursive manner. Even though the growing importance of understanding and predicting the development process of threaded conversations has attracted research community to investigate continuity of online threaded conversations from a perspective of individual posts or comments, little work has focused on predicting the continuity or persistence of online conversations. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model to predict continuity of threaded conversations – whether there will be a newly-arrived comment or not. Cooperating with popular pre-trained text embedding models and graph neural network models, the proposed model captures text, structural, and temporal characteristics of the threaded conversation by an observable time for the final prediction. We evaluate the proposed model with two different types of the threaded conversations, self-introductory Q&A and discussion, which demonstrates that the proposed model can accurately predict the continuity of the conversations regardless of types of threaded conversations. We believe that the proposed methodology and the results can provide the potential insights to advertisers, opinion leaders, or platform designers who want to understand and predict the evolutionary process of threaded conversations.