1,721,102 research outputs found
Between form and perform: the knowledge artifact in organizations and IT design
No full textKnowledge Artifact is an analytical construct by which analysts, researchers and designers from different disciplines usually denote those material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This makes this concept central to understanding organizational ecologies and to the design of IT artifacts that support the knowledge-related activities mentioned above. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing IS literature by providing a conceptual mapping for the interpretation of the heterogeneous contributions on this concept in the specialist literature. Our findings suggest that currently this term denotes a multi-pole and open-ended definition, which several disciplines contribute to shape from their peculiar perspective and to their aims. That notwithstanding, it is possible to detect a spectrum of stances between two main extremes: one pole, which we denote as representational, focusing on knowledge as an "object per se", that is as something that can be either true or false, represented in formal ways, and be stored, transmitted and produced through computational inference; and another pole, which we denote as socially situated, focusing on knowledge as social practice, that is an epiphenomenon of a situated, context-dependent and performative interaction of human actors through and with "objects of knowing". Our study tries to gather complementary ideas of knowledge under a unifying model, which draws upon theories and reviews from many fields. Our main purpose is to shed light on the multiple ways these ideas can inform the "reification" of knowledge into IT artifacts, and investigate whether these seemingly irreconcilable positions can bring value to the IS design research
Human-data interaction in healthcare: acknowledging use-related chasms to design for a better health information
No full textIn this paper, we focus on an emerging strand of IT-oriented research, namely Human-Data Interaction (HDI) and on how this can be applied to healthcare. HDI regards both how humans create and use data by means of interactive systems, which can both assist and constrain them, as well as to passively collect and proactively generate data. Healthcare is a challenging arena to test the potential of HDI towards a new, user-centered perspective on how to support and assess data work, especially in current times where data are becoming increasingly big and many tools are available for the lay people, including doctors and nurses, to interact with health-related data. This paper is a contribution in the direction of considering healthcare data through the lens of HDI, and of framing data visualization tools in this strand of research, in order to let the subtler peculiarities among different kind of data and of their use emerge and be addressed accordingly. Our point is that doing so can promote the design of more usable tools that can support data work from a user-centered and data quality perspective
Probing interactivity in open data for general practice: an evidence-based approach
No full textWe undertook a user study to evaluate whether the perceived utility of some common open data sets for family doctors would increase if they are rendered in interactive heat maps. We also investigated whether Parallel Coordinates (PC) are perceived as a convenient diagram to summarize multiple patients data; and whether making PCs interactive would increase their informativity. We interviewed 29 expert family doctors through a questionnaire to find out that: interactive maps make health datasets be perceived as more useful, especially in regard to registers on exposure to carcinogens. PCs were found to be informative visualizations but making them interactive increases their perceived informativity. In light of this evidence, designing for better interactivity is worthy of further efforts in Human-Data Interaction research
Bridging the "last mile" gap between AI implementation and operation: "data awareness" that matters
Full text linkInterest in the application of machine learning (ML) techniques to medicine is growing fast and wide because of their ability to endow decision support systems with so-called artificial intelligence, particularly in those medical disciplines that extensively rely on digital imaging. Nonetheless, achieving a pragmatic and ecological validation of medical AI systems in real-world settings is difficult, even when these systems exhibit very high accuracy in laboratory settings. This difficulty has been called the "last mile of implementation." In this review of the concept, we claim that this metaphorical mile presents two chasms: the hiatus of human trust and the hiatus of machine experience. The former hiatus encompasses all that can hinder the concrete use of AI at the point of care, including availability and usability issues, but also the contradictory phenomena of cognitive ergonomics, such as automation bias (overreliance on technology) and prejudice against the machine (clearly the opposite). The latter hiatus, on the other hand, relates to the production and availability of a sufficient amount of reliable and accurate clinical data that is suitable to be the "experience" with which a machine can be trained. In briefly reviewing the existing literature, we focus on this latter hiatus of the last mile, as it has been largely neglected by both ML developers and doctors. In doing so, we argue that efforts to cross this chasm require data governance practices and a focus on data work, including the practices of data awareness and data hygiene. To address the challenge of bridging the chasms in the last mile of medical AI implementation, we discuss the six main socio-technical challenges that must be overcome in order to build robust bridges and deploy potentially effective AI in real-world clinical settings
From Care for Design to Becoming Matters: New perspectives for the development of socio-technical systems
No full textIn this paper, we start by deconstructing the widely-mentioned concept of care in the IS literature, to unveil its inherent shortcomings and ambiguities, and find opportunities to go beyond it while preserving its value for the development of better socio-technical systems. We find an important strand in the feminist studies tradition, and in particular in the contributions related to the so called "new materialism". Notwithstanding their differences, these contrarian and often neglected voices point to the importance of relational thinking and material engagement with our technological objects. For this reason, in continuing the path indicated by Ciborra with his idea of care, we advocate a new shift from this step to the next one, where becoming matters more than being, and the caring about matter is more important than design abstractions
Should the culture of participation inform a new ethics of design?
No full textThis paper aims to reflect on the role of Culture of Participation in fostering an Ethics of Design, as a means of true innovation in contemporary society. Participation often stands on commonalities, empathy and the desire to share our own beliefs and world views. The design of artifacts has as its first, though implicit purpose, to convey a message. Our economy relies even more on knowledge-intensive practices and tools, as a powerful lens of analysing problems and finding solutions. Being aware of the message that a powerful knowledge technology may convey offers a unprecedented instrument to improve ours and others lives, when wisely and ethically understood. Starting from a critical consideration of the "comfortable numbness" in mainstream IT design, we would like to suggest how inescapable reflections rooting in STS and in semiotic engineering may help discuss culture of participation from the alternative perspective of the "power" of desig
Exploiting the collective knowledge of communities of experts: The case of conference ranking
No full textIn this paper, we discuss the concept of tacit collective knowledge and focus on how to externalize it to inform discussion and reflective thinking within a community of expert practitioners about their own distributed practices. We draw our approach by outlining the one we undertook in the domain of a scholarly community: how to assess the quality of scientific conferences in the broad area of computer science and IT study. Results show the feasibility and scalability of the approach adopted to externalize tacit collective knowledge
Mapping the knowledge artifact terrain: a quantitative resource for qualitative research
No full textIn this paper, we present a method by which to build a metaphorical map of a portion of the scholarly literature along conceptual dimensions that have been previously characterized in terms of positive, negative and neutral terms. The method allows to "locate" scholarly works in this space, according to multiple criteria, like the definitions that they contain; the relevant concepts that can be extracted by means of a content analysis; and relevant passages that researchers can extract in studying their content. The resulting maps are not representational, nor trying to extract any objective essence of a scientific contribution. Rather, they are resources for the qualitative research, review and interpretation of literature sources. As such, these maps are "knowledge artifacts" in themselves, as they visualize, so to say, the interpretation of a set of works by qualitative researchers, and allow to build a visual comprehension of topological and qualitative relationships between the considered literature contributions. We applied the method to the case of the "knowledge artifact" literature and report the main results in this paper.12-14 November 201
Roles supporting a new idea of development in organizational informatics
No full textL’articolo prende in considerazione una serie di nuove figure che sono emerse negli ultimi tempi in ambito organizzativo a supporto dei processi automatizzati da tecnologie dell’informazione (IT). Ad una rapida disamina di questi ruoli segue l’introduzione di una nuova figura più orientata all’appropriazione delle IT da parte degli utenti finali e alla promozione di un atteggiamento più attivo da parte di questi nel processo di sviluppo, inteso in senso lato, per ridurre il rischio di fallimento di iniziative complesse di informatizzazione organizzativa
The semiotics of configurations for the immanent design of interactive computational systems
Full text linkIn this paper the authors propose a novel semiotic approach to the design of interactive systems and computational systems, grounded in the most recent contributions within the debate around semiotic theory and analysis. This approach, that is here called Semiotics of Configurations (SoC), is proposed for its analytic power in describing material artifacts and settings with a purposely a-conceptualistic stance. The resulting analysis informs a kind of design that is aimed at reproducing and supporting the programs of action detected in the use of artifacts, as this use is "abducted" from the physical and material form of the artifacts themselves and from the observation of how content is transformed within and across them. This approach to design, called immanent design, has inspired a platform for the user-driven development and use of electronic documents and forms in cooperative and organizational domains. The framework is illustrated with a case drawn from a study performed in the domain of hospital work. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
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