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Digital traces as tool of a human-centred design approach
No full textToday humanity generates 5 exabytes of data every 12 hours, through devices that are now extending of our skin, our mind and our existence. The hyperconnected society generates digital traces that, for those who are able to read them, describes the reality of the existence of people, their habits and their needs. Digital traces of online life, the life in which we exist for most of our time - probably coming into the future to live in continuous online flow -, are readable signs of problems related to every aspect of people life’s and therefore citizens. Knowing how to read and understand these traces - data - means knowing how to listen society and its needs, and above all the city and its citizens, the starting point for a human-centered design
3.0 Human Being - new approaches in design
No full textThe concept of Human Centered Design was born in the industrial society, when the individual and the relationship between his body and the objects were at the center of the project.
In the next digital society “the person migrates from the body to the screen” (D. de Kerckhove), and we started to talk about User Centered Design.
Today, in the Network Society, the user largely suffers the influence of the pervasive presence of technology. Technology becomes extension of the body, requiring further adjustments to the specific skills of digital natives. The interaction with digital devices change not only the gestures and posture of the human being but also its behavior.
D. Norman coined the definition User Experience Design, to combine and understand more comprehensively the various aspects involving the person-user.
These changes in design approach highlight the increasingly close relationship between the two elements. Actually we can distinguish and to become aware of our being person or user based on context, associating the first analog-real aspect, and the second a digital-virtual aspect.
However, the time at which the exponential evolution of technology will undergo the final surge is near (R. Kurzweil) with a consequent immersion of technology that will make coincide the person and the user, the analog and the digital, the real and the virtual.
The boundaries between the body and technology are no longer recognizable.
For the 3.0 human being will be required if the new design paradigms. The article aims to analyze a selection of case studies that represent significant models of the new trends, signals of a very near future, and to identify new design approaches
Wear and aware: Citizens, sensors, and data to design inclusive research processes
No full textThe practice of involving citizens or non-expert actors in a research process has become increasingly important in the last decade, both with regard to scientific research activities and in design research processes (Devisch et al., 2018). Ac- cording to this trend, the practice of Citizen Science (CS) – involving citizens in a scientific research process – has seen an increasing popularity from the academic perspective and increasingly from public institutions such as the Europe- an Commission.1 The European Commission’s Green Paper (2014): Citizen Science for Europe: Towards a better society of responsible citizens and empowered research forcefully express- es the argument in terms of a paradigm shift towards a more open research process, by emphasizing that “new participa- tory processes and networking promote the transformation of the scientific system, enabling collective intelligence and the creation of new collaborative knowledge, democratising research and leading to the emergence of new disciplines and connections.”
The involvement of citizens in a design research process through participation in conceptualizing, conducting, ana- lysing, interpreting and defining the implications of services and products could be carried out through different means. Those means may require an active involvement of citizens or may be achieved through a passive (and sometimes uncon- scious) involvement of participants (as, for example, in the case of gathering data through web or social network activ- ities) (Ciuccarelli et al., 2014). In this paper we will focus on processes which actively involve citizens and humans in general that participate in the citizen science processes us- ing wearable devices, with a special focus on urban contexts. This paper will address the following questions: How citizen science processes can increase their inclusivity through the segmentation of targets? How could citizens act as activators of data gathering about an urban context using wearable de- vices? How could devices and sensors be designed in a more effective way
Life-Centered Design and Intersectionality: Citizen Science and Data Visualization as Entry Points
No full textEurope is calling for an ecological transition (Dewberry, 2018; Boehnert, 2019) able to influence social groups and territories. Life-centered approach is an ethical framework in
which life is the ultimate source of value (Orr, 2006) in a process that includes both digital and physical components, social justice and environmental outcomes. Life-centered design is considered by the authors as an approach related to posthuman design (Forlano,
2017) which investigates overcoming the centrality of “humanity” starting, mainly, from two points:
• The concept of the Anthropocene leads us to reconsider the nature/culture duality. Some theoretical frameworks, such as critical posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), propose an alignment of those concepts in a cooperative perspective.
• Since the Enlightenment, humanity has referred to humans that often
present the same characteristics (Western, white, male, etc.) (Braidotti,
2019). The progressive diffusion of inclusive development frameworks pushes us to rethink this model, assuming diversity as a key element.
On this pathway towards a just transition, design is a field that involves humans acting as aggregators of creative practices and facilitating the coevolution of socio-technical aspects of transition phenomena (Geels, 2005). This coevolution is supported by an impulse
that comes from the use of data collection techniques for citizen science. Digital tools, such as cheap sensors, are considered non-human actors which can act as mediators (Latour, 2005), affording new ways of social mobilization around knowledge and feeding new epistemologies in citizen science. Life-centered design could integrate different forms of collaborative action with a focus on the design of the “possible” and with emphasis on the responsibility of design (Lotti, 1998; Thackara, 2005). In this process, technologies are at the service of the inclusive socio-economic components, with direct results in new languages of ethical and free-of-bias relationships (Portugali et al., 2012). The aim of this paper is to outline life-centered design through data visualization and citizen science initiatives carried out by the research group in order to activate an intersectional perspective in relation to climate citizens. The objectives of this research are:
• To increase diversity and intensity of participation through an
intersectional approach.
• To address socio-technical aspects of climate change problems through the co-design of accessible tools.
• To reduce distance between citizens and academia through tailored communication.
Research communication should clarify the implications for individuals who identify
themselves in diversified socio-cultural categories (such as age, gender, sexual orientation, education, ethnicity, ability) in order to favor equal participation (Lakomý et al., 2020). Several gaps in this communication process must be considered: cognitive biases, especially in the social network society (Lauwereyns, 2011); data overexposure and “spectacularization”; data extractive approaches and behavioral economy; and the complex perception/reality relationship. Paradigms of this communication will be identified in order to understand which roles and responsibilities of the different target groups influence their ability to deal with climate change challenges
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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