Understanding Iconography: a method to allow rich picture interpretation to improve.

Information Systems for complex situations often fail to adequately deliver quality and suitability. One reason for this failure is an inability to identify comprehensive user requirements. Seldom do all stakeholders, especially those "invisible‟ or "back room‟ system users, have a voice when systems are designed. If this is a global problem then it may impact on both the public and private sectors in terms of their ability to perform, produce and stay competitive. To improve upon this, system designers use rich pictures as a diagrammatic means of identifying differing world views with the aim of creating shared understanding of the organisation. Rich pictures have predominantly been used as freeform, unstructured tools with no commonly agreed syntax. This research has collated, analysed and documented a substantial collection of rich pictures into a single dataset. Attention has been focussed on three main research areas; how the rich picture is facilitated, how the rich picture is constructed and how to interpret the resultant pictures. This research highlights the importance of the rich picture tool and argues the value of adding levels of structure, in certain cases. It is shown that there are considerable benefits for both the interpreter and the creator by providing a pre-drawing session, a common key of symbols and a framework for icon understanding. In conclusion, it is suggested that there is some evidence that a framework which aims to support the process of the rich picture and aid interpretation is valuable.

Participation Space Studies: a socio-technical exploration of activist and community groups’ use of online and offline spaces to support their work

Participation Space Studies explore eParticipation in the day-to-day activities of local, citizen-led groups, working to improve their communities. The focus is the relationship between activities and contexts. The concept of a participation space is introduced in order to reify online and offline contexts where people participate in democracy. Participation spaces include websites, blogs, email, social media presences, paper media, and physical spaces. They are understood as sociotechnical systems: assemblages of heterogeneous elements, with relevant histories and trajectories of development and use. This approach enables the parallel study of diverse spaces, on and offline. Participation spaces are investigated within three case studies, centred on interviews and participant observation. Each case concerns a community or activist group, in Scotland. The participation spaces are then modelled using a Socio-Technical Interaction Network (STIN) framework (Kling, McKim and King, 2003). The participation space concept effectively supports the parallel investigation of the diverse social and technical contexts of grassroots democracy and the relationship between the case-study groups and the technologies they use to support their work. Participants’ democratic participation is supported by online technologies, especially email, and they create online communities and networks around their goals. The studies illustrate the mutual shaping relationship between technology and democracy. Participants’ choice of technologies can be understood in spatial terms: boundaries, inhabitants, access, ownership, and cost. Participation spaces and infrastructures are used together and shared with other groups. Non-public online spaces, such as Facebook groups, are vital contexts for eParticipation; further, the majority of participants’ work is non-public, on and offline. It is informational, potentially invisible, work that supports public outputs. The groups involve people and influence events through emotional and symbolic impact, as well as rational argument. Images are powerful vehicles for this and digital images become an increasingly evident and important feature of participation spaces throughout the consecutively conducted case studies. Collaboration of diverse people via social media indicates that these spaces could be understood as boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989). The Participation Space Studies draw from and contribute to eParticipation, social informatics, mediation, social shaping studies, and ethnographic studies of Internet use.