Large scale multiuser digital mind mapping tool : a study in usability

Project work can involve multiple people from varying disciplines coming together to solve problems as a group. Large scale interactive displays are presenting new opportunities to support such interactions with interactive and semantically enabled cooperative work tools such as intelligent mind maps. In this paper, we present a novel digital, touch-enabled mind-mapping tool as a first step towards achieving such a vision. This first prototype allows an evaluation of the benefits of a digital environment for a task that would otherwise be performed on paper or flat interactive surfaces. Observations and surveys of 12 participants in 3 groups allowed the formulation of several recommendations for further research into: new methods for capturing text input on touch screens; inclusion of complex structures; multi-user environments and how users make the shift from single- user applications; and how best to navigate large screen real estate in a touch-enabled, co-present multi-user setting.

Burley! (sound design)

A young tetra fish, one of a million in her school, just wants some attention. Feeling lonely and bored, she is attracted by the manic antics of a gang of older fish who spend the hours inventing new extreme sports. She begins a quest to gain their acceptance, but at what cost?

Digital literacies: Understanding the literate practices of refugee kids in an Afterschool Media Club

Since the 2000s, teachers in an increasing number of Australian schools have been learning how to support students with refugee backgrounds. For some of these students, entry into the Australian school system is not easy. English literacy is integral to some of the challenges confronting the students. In response, educators have been developing and researching ways of engaging with the students’ language and literacy learning. Much of the focus has been on traditional print-based school literacies. In contrast, I look here at student engagement in digital literacies in an after-school media club. Several concepts from the theory of French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu are useful for understanding the position of students of refugee background in the Australian school system. Like other conflict theories, Bourdieusian theory has sometimes been criticised as ‘pessimistic’, that is, for suggesting that schools necessarily reproduce social disadvantage. However, others have used Bourdieusian theory to analyse and critique the reproductive work of schooling for groups of students who experience educational disadvantage. I align myself with this latter tradition. Specifically, I use Bourdieu’s triad of concepts to explain aspects of the literacy education experiences of some young people of refugee background: field, capital and habitus. In particular, I look at questions of the legitimation of students’ competences as capital in literate fields within and beyond the school context. Data are drawn from an Australian Research Council-funded project, Digital Learning and Print Literacy: A design experiment for the reform of low socio-economic, culturally diverse schools (2009-14). The data analysed in this chapter include interviews and observations relating to the participation of two Congolese girls in an after school media club. Implications are drawn for teachers of literacy in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts. Consideration is made of early childhood, primary and secondary settings.

Some of the design considerations in power generation from offshore wind farms

The global efforts to reduce carbon emissions from power generation have favoured renewable energy resources such as wind and solar in recent years. The generation of power from the renewable energy resources has become attractive because of various incentives provided by government policies supporting green power. Among the various available renewable energy resources, the power generation from wind has seen tremendous growth in the last decade. This article discusses various advantages of the upcoming offshore wind technology and associated considerations related to their construction. The conventional configuration of the offshore wind farm is based on the alternative current internal links. With the recent advances of improved commercialised converters, voltage source converters based high voltage direct current link for offshore wind farms is gaining popularity. The planning and construction phases of offshore wind farms, including related environmental issues, are discussed here.

Are you on board? The role of design-led innovation in strengthening key partnerships within an Australian airport

A popular lexicon for announcing partnerships within aviation is being ‘on-board’. Like boarding a plane, business partnerships requires trust in the expertise and the philosophy of another organisation. This paper reports upon the process and findings from the completion of a customer engagement project within a leading Australian Airport, as part of the wider uptake of design-led innovation. The project was completed bilaterally with Airport Corporation and prominent retail business partner undertaking a design-led approach to collaboratively explore an observed market trend affecting the performance of both businesses. A design-led catalyst facilitated the completion of this project, working within the Airport Corporation to disseminate the skills and philosophy of design over an 18 month period using an action research method. Findings reveal that the working environment necessary for design to be utilised requires; trust in the design-led approach as a new and exploratory way of completing work; leadership within the execution and delivery of project deliverables, and; a shared intrinsic motivation to develop new skills through a design-led approach which challenges a business-as-usual mentality (BAU). Design-led innovation can be deployed specifically to strengthen business partnerships through collaborative and explorative customer engagement.

Designing a digital experience for young children with developmental disabilities

This paper reports on the development of a playful digital experience, Anim-action, designed for young children with developmental disabilities. This experience was built using the Stomp platform, a technology designed specifically to meet the needs of people with intellectual disability through facilitating whole body interaction. We provide detail on how knowledge gained from key stakeholders informed the design of the application and describe the design guidelines used in the development process. A study involving 13 young children with developmental disabilities was conducted to evaluate the extent to which Anim-action facilitates cognitive, social and physical activity. Results demonstrated that Anim-action effectively supports cognitive and physical activity. In particular, it promoted autonomy and encouraged problem solving and motor planning. Conversely, there were limitations in the system’s ability to support social interaction, in particular, cooperation. Results have been analyzed to determine how design guidelines might be refined to address these limitations.

Design of coreless PCB transformers for power and signal isolation in a modular ADC system for power quality data acquisition

Available industrial energy meters offer high accuracy and reliability, but are typically expensive and low-bandwidth, making them poorly suited to multi-sensor data acquisition schemes and power quality analysis. An alternative measurement system is proposed in this paper that is highly modular, extensible and compact. To minimise cost, the device makes use of planar coreless PCB transformers to provide galvanic isolation for both power and data. Samples from multiple acquisition devices may be concentrated by a central processor before integration with existing host control systems. This paper focusses on the practical design and implementation of planar coreless PCB transformers to facilitate the module's isolated power, clock and data signal transfer. Calculations necessary to design coreless PCB transformers, and circuits designed for the transformer's practical application in the measurement module are presented. The designed transformer and each application circuit have been experimentally verified, with test data and conclusions made applicable to coreless PCB transformers in general.

Theorizing why in digital learning: Opening frontiers for inquiry and innovation with technology

Asking why is an important foundation of inquiry and fundamental to the development of reasoning skills and learning. Despite this, and despite the relentless and often disruptive nature of innovations in information and communications technology (ICT), sophisticated tools that directly support this basic act of learning appear to be undeveloped, not yet recognized, or in the very early stages of development. Why is this so? To this question, there is no single factual answer. In response, however, plausible explanations and further questions arise, and such responses are shown to be typical consequences of why-questioning. A range of contemporary scenarios are presented to highlight the problem. Consideration of the various inputs into the evolution of digital learning is introduced to provide historical context and this serves to situate further discussion regarding innovation that supports inquiry-based learning. This theme is further contextualized by narratives on openness in education, in which openness is also shown to be an evolving construct. Explanatory and descriptive contents are differentiated in order to scope out the kinds of digital tools that might support inquiry instigated by why-questioning and which move beyond the search paradigm. Probing why from a linguistic perspective reveals versatile and ambiguous semantics. The why dimension—asking, learning, knowing, understanding, and explaining why—is introduced as a construct that highlights challenges and opportunities for ICT innovation. By linking reflective practice and dialogue with cognitive engagement, this chapter points to specific frontiers for the design and development of digital learning tools, frontiers in which inquiry may find new openings for support.

Growing food in the city : Design ideations for urban residential gardeners

Urban agriculture refers to the production of food in urban and peri-urban spaces. It can contribute positively to health and food security of a city, while also reducing ‘food miles.’ It takes on many forms, from the large and organised community garden, to the small and discrete backyard or balcony. This study focuses on small-scale food production in the form of residential gardening for home or personal use. We explore opportunities to support people’s engagement in urban agriculture via human-computer interaction design. This research presents the findings and HCI design insights from our study of residential gardeners in Brisbane, Australia. By exploring their understanding of gardening practice with a human-centred design approach, we present six key themes, highlighting opportunities and challenges relating to available time and space; the process of learning and experimentation; and the role of existing online platforms to support gardening practice. Finally we discuss the overarching theme of shared knowledge, and how HCI could improve community engagement and gardening practice.

Using a free online questionnaire to determine the skills, competencies and knowledge required to work in a digital library environment in Australia

This paper discusses the data collection technique used to determine the skills and knowledge required of academic librarians working in a digital library environment in Australia. The research was undertaken as part of the researcher’s master’s thesis conducted at Tallinn University. The data collection instrument used was a freely available online survey tool, and its advantages and disadvantages are discussed in terms of the desired outcomes and circumstances surrounding the thesis project. Decisions regarding the design of the questionnaire are also discussed.

Proceedings of the Digital Cities 9 Workshop - Hackable Cities – From Subversive City Making to Systemic Change (Workshop) [Edited Proceedings]

The DC9 workshop takes place on June 27, 2015 in Limerick, Ireland and is titled “Hackable Cities: From Subversive City Making to Systemic Change”. The notion of “hacking” originates from the world of media technologies but is increasingly often being used for creative ideals and practices of city making. “City hacking” evokes more participatory, inclusive, decentralized, playful and subversive alternatives to often top-down ICT implementations in smart city making. However, these discourses about “hacking the city” are used ambiguously and are loaded with various ideological presumptions, which makes the term also problematic. For some “urban hacking” is about empowering citizens to organize around communal issues and perform aesthetic urban interventions. For others it raises questions about governance: what kind of “city hacks” should be encouraged or not, and who decides? Can city hacking be curated? For yet others, trendy participatory buzzwords like these are masquerades for deeply libertarian neoliberal values. Furthermore, a question is how “city hacking” may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to the strategic level of enduring impact. The Digital Cities 9 workshop welcomes papers that explore the idea of “hackable city making” in constructive and critical ways.

Design and evaluation of intentionally enriched awareness

In this chapter we introduce and explore the notion of “intentionally enriched awareness”. Intentional enrichment refers to the process of actively engaging users in the awareness process by enabling them to express intentions. We initially look at the phenomenon if sharing intentional information in related collaborative systems. We then explore the concept of intentional enrichment through designing and evaluating the AnyBiff system which allows users to freely create, share and use a variety of biff applications. Biffs are simple representation of pre-defined activities. Users can select biffs to indicate that they are engaged in an activity. We summarise the results of a trial which allowed us to gain insights into the potential of the AnyBiff prototype and the underlying biff concept to implement intentionally enriched awareness. Our findings show that intentional disclosure mechanisms in the form of biffs were successfully used in a variety of contexts. Users actively engaged in the design of a large variety of biffs and explored many different uses of the concept. The study revealed a whole host of issues with regard to intentionally enriched awareness which give valuable insight into the conception and design of future applications in this area.

Design of a tangible data visualization (extended)

In this paper we describe the design of DNA Jewelry, which is a wearable tangible data representation of personal DNA profile data. An iterative design process was followed to develop a 3D form-language that could be mapped to standard DNA profile data, with the aim of retaining readability of data while also producing an aesthetically pleasing and unique result in the area of personalised design. The work explores design issues with the production of data tangibles, contributes to a growing body of research exploring tangible representations of data and highlights the importance of approaches that move between technology, art and design.

Typologies and touchpoints: Designing multi-channel digital strategies

Purpose This study aims to gain a clearer understanding of digital channel design. The emergence of new technologies has revolutionised the way companies interact and engage with customers. The driver for this research was the suggestion that practitioners feel they do not possess the skills to understand and exploit new digital channel opportunities. To gain a clearer understanding of digital channel design, this paper addresses the research question: What digital channels do companies from a wide range of industries and sectors use? Design/methodology/approach A content analysis of 100 international companies was conducted with multiple data sources to form a typology of digital “touchpoints”. The appropriateness of a digital channel typology for this study was for developing rigorous and useful concepts for clarifying and refining the meaning of digital channels. Findings This study identifies what digital channels companies globally currently employ and explores the related needs across industries. A total of 34 digital touchpoints and 4 typologies of digital channels were identified across 16 industries. This research helps to identify the relationship between digital channels and enabling the connections with industry. Research limitations/implications The findings contribute to the growing research area of digital channels. The typology of digital channels is a useful starting point for developing a systematic, theory-based study for enabling the development of broader, comprehensive theories of digital channels. Practical implications Typologies and touchpoints are outlined in relation to industry, company objectives and customer needs to allow businesses to seize opportunities and optimise performance through individual touchpoints. A digital channel model as a key outcome of this research guides practitioners on what touchpoint to implement through an interrelated understanding of industry, company and customer needs. Originality/value This is the first paper to explore a range of industries in relation to their use of digital channels using a unique content analysis. Contributions include clarifying and refining digital channel meaning; identifying and refining the hierarchical relations among digital channels(typologies); and establishing typology and industry relationship model.

Performative digital asset management: To propose a framework and proof of concept model that effectively enables researchers to document, archive and curate their non-traditional research data

This cross disciplinary study was conducted as two research and development projects. The outcome is a multimodal and dynamic chronicle, which incorporates the tracking of spatial, temporal and visual elements of performative practice-led and design-led research journeys. The distilled model provides a strong new approach to demonstrate rigour in non-traditional research outputs including provenance and an 'augmented web of facticity'.