Designing tools that enhance communication and understanding between multiple stakeholders: the case of mobile payment value networks

The pervasive use of mobile technologies has provided new opportunities for organisations to achieve competitive advantage by using a value network of partners to create value for multiple users. The delivery of a mobile payment (m-payment) system is an example of a value network as it requires the collaboration of multiple partners from diverse industries, each bringing their own expertise, motivations and expectations. Consequently, managing partnerships has been identified as a core competence required by organisations to form viable partnerships in an m-payment value network and an important factor in determining the sustainability of an m-payment business model. However, there is evidence that organisations lack this competence which has been witnessed in the m-payment domain where it has been attributed as an influencing factor in a number of failed m-payment initiatives since 2000. In response to this organisational deficiency, this research project leverages the use of design thinking and visualisation tools to enhance communication and understanding between managers who are responsible for managing partnerships within the m-payment domain. By adopting a design science research approach, which is a problem solving paradigm, the research builds and evaluates a visualisation tool in the form of a Partnership Management Canvas. In doing so, this study demonstrates that when organisations encourage their managers to adopt design thinking, as a way to balance their analytical thinking and intuitive thinking, communication and understanding between the partners increases. This can lead to a shared understanding and a shared commitment between the partners. In addition, the research identifies a number of key business model design issues that need to be considered by researchers and practitioners when designing an m-payment business model. As an applied research project, the study makes valuable contributions to the knowledge base and to the practice of management.

Design history: exploring corporate communities

A design history is a narrative involving a multitude of social groups, interpretive flexibility, and eventual stabilization of shared understanding. Design history surfaces the practices that help shape and define engagements and can increase not only our theoretical understanding of what design is, but also our capacity to realize this understanding in practice. We use a design history perspective to examine how corporate technology initiatives establish and support open source communities and the crafting of relevant design practices that enable their advancement. We foster an evolving expression of design research that treats artifacts not as stable objects to be singularly evaluated, but as evolving systems contingent on historical trajectories.

Towards a regional understanding of Irish traditional music

The geography of Irish traditional music is a complex, popular and largely unexplored element of the narrative of the tradition. Geographical concepts such as the region are recurrent in the discourse of Irish traditional music but regions and their processes are, for the most part, blurred or misunderstood. This thesis explores the geographical approach to the study of Irish traditional music focusing on the concept of the region and, in particular, the role of memory in the construction and diffusion of regional identities. This is a tripartite study considering people, place and music. Each of these elements impacts on our experience of the other. All societies have created music. Music is often associated with or derived from places. Some places construct or reinforce their identity through the music and musicians through which they are associated. The thesis challenges conventional discourse on regional styles that construct an imagined pattern of regions based on subtle musical differences that may, though are not always, shared by people in that region and focuses on the social networks through which the music is disseminated. The thesis also challenges the abandonment of regional styles and the concept of regions in understanding the complex geographies of Irish traditional music (Morton, 2001). It seeks to find a middle ground between discourse analysis, musical analysis, the experience of music and place, and the representation of music and place. The dissertation is divided into three parts. Part one considers the development of music geography, noting and critiquing the abandonment of useful paradigms in both geography and ethnomusicology in search of new ways of understanding. Of particular interest is the concept of the region but it also considers the study of landscape and the humanist approach in cultural geography. The second part focuses on the discourse and study of regions in Irish traditional music and the various agents and processes that shape the concept of the region in Irish traditional music. The final part presents a case study of the Sliabh Luachra region combining and applying the various perspectives and paradigms drawn from geographical, ethnomusicological and anthropological sources. It attempts to generate an understanding of Sliabh Luachra as a region in the Irish traditional music narrative that is based on a combination of musical, socio-cultural and locational/environmental factors.