Advice-implicative interrogatives : building 'client-centered" support in a children's helpline

Interactional research on advice giving has described advice as normative and asymmetric. In this paper we examine how these dimensions of advice are softened by counselors on a helpline for children and young people through the use of questions. Through what we term ‘‘adviceimplicative interrogatives,’’ counselors ask clients about the relevance or applicability of a possible future course of action. The allusion to this possible action by the counselor identifies it as normatively relevant, and displays the counselor’s epistemic authority in relation to dealing with a client’s problems. However, the interrogative format mitigates the normative and asymmetric dimensions typical of advice sequences by orienting to the client’s epistemic authority in relation to their own lives, and delivering advice in a way that is contingent upon the client’s accounts of their experiences, capacities, and understandings. The demonstration of the use of questions in advice sequences offers an interactional specification of the ‘‘client-centered’’ support that is characteristic of prevailing counseling practice. More specifically, it shows how the values of empowerment and child-centered practice, which underpin services such as Kids Helpline, are embodied in specific interactional devices. Detailed descriptions of this interactional practice offer fresh insights into the use of interrogatives in counseling contexts, and provide practitioners with new ways of thinking about, and discussing, their current practices.

Extending client-centered support : counselors’ proposals to shift from email to telephone counseling

The availability and use of online counseling approaches has increased rapidly over the last decade. While research has suggested a range of potential affordances and limitations of online counseling modalities, very few studies have offered detailed examinations of how counselors and clients manage asynchronous email counseling exchanges. In this paper we examine email exchanges involving clients and counselors through Kids Helpline, a national Australian counseling service that offers free online, email and telephone counseling for young people up to the age of 25. We employ tools from the traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to analyze the ways in which counselors from Kids Helpline request that their clients call them, and hence change the modality of their counseling relationship, from email to telephone counseling. This paper shows the counselors’ three multi-layered approaches in these emails as they negotiate the potentially delicate task of requesting and persuading a client to change the trajectory of their counseling relationship from text to talk without placing that relationship in jeopardy.

User-centered video quality assessment for scalable video coding of H.264/AVC standard

Scalable video coding of H.264/AVC standard enables adaptive and flexible delivery for multiple devices and various network conditions. Only a few works have addressed the influence of different scalability parameters (frame rate, spatial resolution, and SNR) on the user perceived quality within a limited scope. In this paper, we have conducted an experiment of subjective quality assessment for video sequences encoded with H.264/SVC to gain a better understanding of the correlation between video content and UPQ at all scalable layers and the impact of rate-distortion method and different scalabilities on bitrate and UPQ. Findings from this experiment will contribute to a user-centered design of adaptive delivery of scalable video stream.

Multiple perspectives of design thinking in business education

Business education leaders have expressed interest in learning more about design and design thinking and their contributions to better problem framing, problem solving and to generating new solutions. Many business schools have engaged in educational programs with students from multiple disciplines, applying design thinking to business problems around workplace issues. This paper investigates a range of educational programs that teach design thinking to students in business education, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels around the world. We identify four patterns of program delivery that are emerging: human-centered design, integrative thinking, design management and design as strategy and discuss contributions from each. We expect that these four patterns of program delivery will continue and predict an increasing focus on programs around design as strategy in the near future.

Making sense of purpose, direction and innovation : an embedded design led innovation case study in the Australian mining industry

The mining equipment technology services sector is driven by a reactive and user-centered design approach, with a technological focus on incremental new product development. As Australia moves out of its sustained mining boom, companies need to rethink their strategic position, to become agile to stay relevant in an enigmatic market. This paper reports on the first five months on an embedded case study within an Australian, family-owned mining manufacturer. The first author is currently engaged in a longitudinal design led innovation project, as a catalyst to guide the company’s journey to design integration. The results find that design led innovation could act as a channel for highlighting and exploring company disconnections with the marketplace and offer a customer-centric catalyst for internal change. Data collected for this study is from 12 analysed semistructured interviews, a focus group and a reflective journal, over a five-month period. This paper explores limitations to design integration, and highlights opportunities to explore and leverage entrepreneurial characteristics to stay agile, broaden innovation and future-proof through the next commodity cycle in the mining industry.

Sustainable building envelope design by considering energy cost and occupant satisfaction

The built environment is a major contributor to the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, with a considerable amount of energy being consumed in buildings due to heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, space illumination, use of electrical appliances, etc., to facilitate various anthropogenic activities. The development of sustainable buildings seeks to ameliorate this situation mainly by reducing energy consumption. Sustainable building design, however, is a complicated process involving a large number of design variables, each with a range of feasible values. There are also multiple, often conflicting, objectives involved such as the life cycle costs and occupant satisfaction. One approach to dealing with this is through the use of optimization models. In this paper, a new multi-objective optimization model is developed for sustainable building design by considering the design objectives of cost and energy consumption minimization and occupant comfort level maximization. In a case study demonstration, it is shown that the model can derive a set of suitable design solutions in terms of life cycle cost, energy consumption and indoor environmental quality so as to help the client and design team gain a better understanding of the design space and trade-off patterns between different design objectives. The model can very useful in the conceptual design stages to determine appropriate operational settings to achieve the optimal building performance in terms of minimizing energy consumption and maximizing occupant comfort level.

Business process modeling : perceived benefits

The process-centered design of organizations and information systems is globally seen as an appropriate response to the increased economic pressure on organizations. At the methodological core of process-centered management is process modeling. However, business process modeling in large initiatives can be a time-consuming and costly exercise, making it potentially difficult to convince executive management of its benefits. To date, and despite substantial interest and research in the area of process modeling, the understanding of the actual benefits of process modeling in academia and practice is limited. To address this gap, this paper explores the perception of benefits derived from process modeling initiatives, as reported through a global Delphi study. The study incorporates the views of three groups of stakeholders – academics, practitioners and vendors. Our findings lead to the first identification and ranking of 19 unique benefits associated with process modeling. The study in particular found that process modeling benefits vary significantly between practitioners and academics. We argue that these variations may point to a dangerous disconnect between research projects and practical demands.

General characteristics of anticipated user experience (AUX) with interactive products

Providing a positive user experience (UX) has become the key differentiator for products to win a competition in mature markets. To ensure that a product will support enjoyable experiences for its users, assessment of UX should be conducted early during the design and development process. However, most UX frameworks and evaluation techniques focus on understanding and assessing user’s experience with functional prototypes or existing products. This situation delays UX assessment until the late phases of product development which may result in costly design modifications and less desirable products. A qualitative study was conducted to investigate anticipated user experience (AUX) to address this issue. Twenty pairs of participants were asked to imagine an interactive product, draw their product concept, and anticipate their interactions and experiences with it. The data was analyzed to identify general characteristics of AUX. We found that while positive AUX was mostly related to an imagined/desired product, negative AUX was mainly associated with existing products. It was evident that the pragmatic quality of product was fundamental, and significantly influenced user’s anticipated experiences. Furthermore, the hedonic quality of product received more focus in positive than negative AUX. The results also showed that context, user profile, experiential knowledge, and anticipated emotion could be reflected in AUX. The understanding of AUX will help product designers to better foresee the users’ underlying needs and to focus on the most important aspects of their positive experiences, which in turn facilitates the designers to ensure pleasurable UX from the start of the design process.

Anticipating user experience with a desired product : the AUX Framework

Positive user experience (UX) has become a key factor in designing interactive products. It acts as a differentiator which can determine a product’s success on the mature market. However, current UX frameworks and methods do not fully support the early stages of product design and development. During these phases, assessment of UX is challenging as no actual user-product interaction can be tested. This qualitative study investigated anticipated user experience (AUX) to address this problem. Using the co-discovery method, participants were asked to imagine a desired product, anticipate experiences with it, and discuss their views with another participant. Fourteen sub-categories emerged from the data, and relationships among them were defined through co-occurrence analysis. These data formed the basis of the AUX framework which consists of two networks which elucidate 1) how users imagine a desired product and 2) how they anticipate positive experiences with that product. Through this AUX framework, important factors in the process of imagining future products and experiences were learnt, including the way in which these factors interrelate. Focusing on and exploring each component of the two networks in the framework will allow designers to obtain a deeper understanding of the required pragmatic and hedonic qualities of product, intended uses of product, user characteristics, potential contexts of experience, and anticipated emotions embedded within the experience. This understanding, in turn, will help designers to better foresee users’ underlying needs and to focus on the most important aspects of their positive experience. Therefore, the use of the AUX framework in the early stages of product development will contribute to the design for pleasurable UX.

CubIT : Large-scale multi-user presentation and collaboration

CubIT is a multi-user, large-scale presentation and collaboration framework installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility, an interactive facility made up 48 multi-touch screens and very large projected display screens. CubIT was built to make the Cube facility accessible to QUT’s academic and student population. The system allows users to upload, interact with and share media content on the Cube’s very large display surfaces. CubIT implements a unique combination of features including RFID authentication, content management through multiple interfaces, multi-user shared workspace support, drag and drop upload and sharing, dynamic state control between different parts of the system and execution and synchronisation of the system across multiple computing nodes.

The phenomena of auditory hallucination as described by Indonesian people living with schizophrenia

This study was a phenomenological inquiry of the experience of auditory hallucinations as described by 13 Indonesian people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The interviewees included 6 men and 7 women and they were aged between 19 and 56 years. Four themes emerged from this study: feeling more like a robot than a human being; voices of contradiction - a point of confusion; tattered relationships and family disarray; and normalizing the presence of voices as part of everyday life. The findings of this study have the potential to contribute to new understandings of how people live with and manage auditory hallucinations and so enhance client-centered nursing care.

Developing a dashboard for real-time data stream composition and visualization

Technological advances have led to an influx of affordable hardware that supports sensing, computation and communication. This hardware is increasingly deployed in public and private spaces, tracking and aggregating a wealth of real-time environmental data. Although these technologies are the focus of several research areas, there is a lack of research dealing with the problem of making these capabilities accessible to everyday users. This thesis represents a first step towards developing systems that will allow users to leverage the available infrastructure and create custom tailored solutions. It explores how this notion can be utilized in the context of energy monitoring to improve conventional approaches. The project adopted a user-centered design process to inform the development of a flexible system for real-time data stream composition and visualization. This system features an extensible architecture and defines a unified API for heterogeneous data streams. Rather than displaying the data in a predetermined fashion, it makes this information available as building blocks that can be combined and shared. It is based on the insight that individual users have diverse information needs and presentation preferences. Therefore, it allows users to compose rich information displays, incorporating personally relevant data from an extensive information ecosystem. The prototype was evaluated in an exploratory study to observe its natural use in a real-world setting, gathering empirical usage statistics and conducting semi-structured interviews. The results show that a high degree of customization does not warrant sustained usage. Other factors were identified, yielding recommendations for increasing the impact on energy consumption.

FixVegas : facilitating multi-directional communication between government officials and citizens to support urban planning in the city of Brisbane

The goal of this project was to develop a mobile application for the iOS platform, that would support the partner of this project, the Brisbane City Council, in stronger engage citizens in participating in urban planning and development projects. The resulting application is an extended version of FixVegas, a system that allows citizens to report maintenance request to the Brisbane City Council through their smartphone. The new version of the system makes all incoming requests publicly available within the application, allows users to support, comment or disapprove of these. As an addition, the concept of the idea has been introduced. Citizens can submit suggestions for improving the city to the municipality, discuss them with other fellow citizens and, ideally, also with Council representatives. The city officials as well are provided with the ability of publishing development project as an idea and let citizens deliberate it. This way, bidirectional communication between these two parties is created. A web interface complements the iPhone application. The system has been developed after the principle of User Centered Design, by assessing user needs, creating and evaluating prototypes and conducting a user study. The study showed that FixVegas2 has been perceived as an enhancement compared to the previous version, and that the idea concept has been received on a positive note. Indepth questions, such as the influence the system could have on community dynamics or the public participation in urban planning projects could only hardly investigated. However, these findings can be achieved by the alternative study designs that have been proposed.

Supporting collaboration on very large-scale interactive wall surfaces

In this paper we describe CubIT, a multi-user presentation and collaboration system installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility. The ‘Cube’ is an interactive visualisation facility made up of five very large-scale interactive multi-panel wall displays, each consisting of up to twelve 55-inch multi-touch screens (48 screens in total) and massive projected display screens situated above the display panels. The paper outlines the unique design challenges, features, implementation and evaluation of CubIT. The system was built to make the Cube facility accessible to QUT’s academic and student population. CubIT enables users to easily upload and share their own media content, and allows multiple users to simultaneously interact with the Cube’s wall displays. The features of CubIT were implemented via three user interfaces, a multi-touch interface working on the wall displays, a mobile phone and tablet application and a web-based content management system. Each of these interfaces plays a different role and offers different interaction mechanisms. Together they support a wide range of collaborative features including multi-user shared workspaces, drag and drop upload and sharing between users, session management and dynamic state control between different parts of the system. The results of our evaluation study showed that CubIT was successfully used for a variety of tasks, and highlighted challenges with regards to user expectations regarding functionality as well as issues arising from public use.

Day in the Lab : Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology

The Urban Informatics Research Lab brings together a group of people who focus their research on interdisciplinary topics at the intersection of social, spatial, and technical research domains—that is, people, place, and technology. Those topics are spread across the breadth of urban life—its contemporary issues and its needs, as well as the design opportunities that we have as individuals, groups, communities, and as a whole society. The lab’s current research areas include urban planning and design, civic innovation, mobility and transportation, education and connected learning, environmental sustainability, and food and urban agriculture. The common denominator of the lab’s approach is user-centered design research directed toward understanding, conceptualizing, developing, and evaluating sociotechnical practices as well as the opportunities afforded by innovative digital technology in urban environments.