1,354,565 research outputs found
Design trade-offs in cultures of participation: empowering end users to improve their quality of life
No full textThe society we live in today is frequently referred to as knowledge society or knowledge economy, and the futurist Toffler (Citation1981) refers to it as ‘The Third Wave Society’ by arguing it is as distinct as the previously much longer lasting agricultural society and industrial society. Toffler predicted the trajectory technology and society would take – from centralised, mass industrial institutions to decentralised, ‘de-massified’, customised niches and networks, which would require knowledge and technology as key elements.
In the last decades, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have made tremendous progress, but their development and adoption have not necessarily led to an improvement of quality of life (Fischer Citation2018). The digital age transforms human life style, habits, culture, organisational activities and architectures. In turn, services and applications of ICT continuously evolve with the social world in order to meet human and organisational requirements. From this perspective, cultures of participation (Fischer Citation2011) have emerged as the result of the shift from consumer cultures, where people are passive recipients of artefacts and systems, to cultures in which users are actively involved in the development of solutions to their problems.
Cultures of participation need to be supported by the design of digital networked environments (Benkler Citation2006) through traditional and innovative technical infrastructures. This requires that designers understand related challenges and provide socio-technical environments for empowering end users to develop critical thinking skills, grow ideas, and adapt or create their own digital artefacts; in this way, users may become active contributors in personally meaningful activities (Caivano et al. Citation2018).
However, designing such socio-technical environments is not a straightforward process: design trade-offs (Fischer Citation2018) must always be dealt with, in order to identify a satisficing solution (Simon Citation1996) in a particular context, on the basis of specific people’s objectives, preferences and values. Trade-offs can be recognised in all those situations where one needs to renounce to something in order to gain something else. Problem solving usually represents one of these situations, and three types of trade-offs are of special interest: (1) Trade-offs in balancing the goals to be achieved and the constraints associated with tasks and sub-goals for achieving it (Newell and Simon Citation1972), (2) trade-offs associated with switching between problem framing and problem solving (Schön Citation1983) and (3) trade-offs in conquering tame problems versus wicked problems (Rittel and Webber Citation1984). These trade-offs operate on different levels of abstraction and for different domains. Identifying, exploring and evaluating design trade-offs represent a unique challenge in designing socio-technical environments for quality of life.
In Europe 2020 strategy,Footnote1 one of the most important objectives for quality of life is social inclusion (Bjerknes and Bratteteig Citation1995; Nygaard Citation1986). It is the process of improving the terms of participation in society, particularly for people who are disadvantaged, such as disabled people, elderly people, learners of all ages and all groups that have to cope with the use of non-convivial tools (Illich Citation1973). In such contexts, designing for cultures of participation and social inclusion means to take into account all the peculiar characteristics of stakeholders and the diversity of user differences to find out what trade-offs have to be dealt with for satisfying their expectations and reaching the desired outcomes (Barricelli et al. Citation2018).
Meta-design (‘design for designers’) (Fischer, Fogli, and Piccinno Citation2017), end-user development (EUD) (Lieberman et al. Citation2006; Paterno and Wulf Citation2017; Barricelli et al. Citation2019) and collaborative knowledge construction (Mørch, Caruso, and Hartley Citation2017) could facilitate dealing with design trade-offs by fostering the creation of socio-technical environments in which end users can be creative and participate in design activities. The monopoly of highly trained computing professionals acting as ‘high-tech scribes’ should be eliminated with design environments supported by meta-design. This does not mean that there is no place for professional programmers and system designers in the future, but it suggests that one of the most important objectives of the professional computing community should be to create systems that will put owners of problems in charge. Achieving this goal is not only a technical problem but requires also considerable social effort, knowledge and skills (such as new forms of knowledge sharing). If the most important role for computation in the future is to provide people with a powerful medium for expression, then the medium should support them in working on the task of their interest, rather than requiring them to spend intellectual resources on the medium itself. The context for human development is always a socio-cultural setting of people and technologies, never an isolated technology or knowledge in a vacuum. Our current cultures largely move in the direction of making learners increasingly independent of high-tech scribes. This is manifest in that learners have acquired true computational fluency by growing up with digital media as a primary representation for thinking, learning, working and collaborating. The right kind of socio-technical environments (bringing people and media together) will allow learners to become independent of high-tech scribes in the context of personally meaningful problems, such as complex problem solving, social activities and collaborative knowledge construction.
While several approaches and tools have been proposed over the years to support cultures of participation and social inclusion, a reflection on the design trade-offs that led to their proposals or that emerged during their development is still missing. Moreover, the impact on the quality of life of proposed solutions is rarely critically analysed.
The aim of this special issue is to fill this gap and describe recent research studies concerning the design of systems empowering end users to participate in personally meaningful activities with a focus on the design trade-offs associated with quality of life
AN INNOVATIVE TOOLBOX FOR THE OPTIMAL DESIGN AND OPERATION OF INTEGRATED LOCAL ENERGY COMMUNITIES
No full textBy providing important benefits such as reducing primary energy consumption, improving environmental conditions,
and increasing resilience of energy supply, integrated local energy communities (ILECs) represent a viable option to centralized energy systems for fostering decarbonization, thanks to the exploitation of synergies coming from different energy carries beyond electricity and the active involvement of end-users through a collegial approach. To achieve these benefits, the optimisation of ILECs design and operation is as crucial as it is challenging. This paper presents the results from
an activity of the eNeuron H2020 project (Nov 2020-Oct. 2024, ID: 957779), and aims to present an innovative
toolbox for the optimal design and operation of ILECs integrating multiple energy carriers at different scales and considering different time horizons from long-term system planning to real-time operation. To achieve the short- and long-term sustainability of this new energy paradigm, a multi-objective economic-environmental approach is proposed, whereby a peer-to peer market is established to promote end-users’ active involvement while guaranteeing that they are aligned with the overall ILEC’s objectives
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe 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
End-User Development in Industry 4.0: Challenges and Opportunities
No full textThis position paper aims to discuss challenges and opportunities related to human-computer interaction technologies for Industry 4.0 and to explore the role that end-user development can play in new industrial scenarios. The paper highlights the gap between what Industry 4.0 and related enabling technologies promise and how the Operator 4.0 will be called on to change his/her work practice. End-user development and meta-design are here proposed as suitable methods to fill this gap and improve operators’ quality of work
Variations on the Author
No full text“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
CoPDA 2022 - Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age: AI for Humans or Humans for AI?
No full textAppropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe 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
Cultures of participation in the digital age: empowering end users to improve their quality of life
No full textThe International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - Empowering End Users to Improve their Quality of Life (CoPDA) focuses on how ICT can have an impact on “quality of life”, promoting new ways of design that allow us to face these challenges. The workshop brings together contributions from researchers from a diverse range of interdisciplinary fields.
The aim is to establish a community of researchers and practitioners and facilitate the production of a coherent body of work related to this area
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