Supporting cooperative design through "living" artefacts

We present findings from a field trial of CAM (Cooperative Artefact Memory) -- a mobile-tagging based messaging system -- in a design studio environment. CAM allows individuals to collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design artefacts, such as sketches, collages, story-boards, and physical mock-ups in the form of messages, annotations and external web links. We studied the use of CAM in three student design projects. We observed that CAM facilitated new ways of collaborating in joint design projects. The serendipitous and asynchronous nature of CAM facilitated expressions of design aesthetics, allowed designers to have playful interactions, supported exploration of new design ideas, and supported designers' reflective practices. In general, our results show how CAM transformed mundane design artefacts into "living" artefacts that made the creative and playful side of cooperative design visible.

Experiential role of artefacts in cooperative design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an 'experiential' role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the materiality, use and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people's performance and help them make better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain such as industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by design-related artefacts such as sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes -- used and developed in designers' everyday work. Our main intention in carrying out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers' everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on the personal, social and creative side of people's everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a much broader view in the design of new interactive technologies.

Physicality and cooperative design

CSCW researchers have increasingly come to realize that the material work setting and its population of artefacts play a crucial part in coordination of distributed or co-located work. This paper uses the notion of physicality as a basis to understand cooperative work. Using examples from an ongoing fieldwork on cooperative design practices, it provides a conceptual understanding of physicality and shows that material settings and co-workers’ working practices play an important role in understanding the physicality of cooperative design.

Designing awareness support for distributed cooperative design teams

Motivation Awareness is an integral part of remote collaborative work and has been an important theme within the CSCW research. Our project aims at understanding and mediating non-verbal cues between remote participants involved in a design project. Research approach Within the AMIDA project we focus on distributed 'cooperative design' teams. We especially focus on the 'material' signals - signals in which people communicate through material artefacts, locations and their embodied actions. We apply an ethnographic approach to understand the role of physical artefacts in co-located naturalistic design setting. Based on the results we will generate important implications to support remote design work. We plan to develop a mixed-reality interface supported by a shared awareness display. This awareness display will provide information about the activities happening in the design room to remotely located participants. Findings/Design Our preliminary investigation with real-world design teams suggests that both the materiality of designers' work settings and their social practices play an important role in understanding these material signals that are at play. Originality/Value Most research supporting computer mediated communication have focused on either face-to-face or linguistically oriented communication paradigms. Our research focuses on mediating the non-verbal, material cues for supporting collaborative activities without impoverishing what designers do in their day to day working lives. Take away message An ethnographic approach allows us to understand the naturalistic practices of design teams, which can lead to designing effective technologies to support group work. In that respect, the findings of our research will have a generic value beyond the application domain chosen (design teams).

On power minimisation and SNR maximisation of distributed beamforming in cooperative communication systems

A comparison of relay power minimisation subject to received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver and SNR maximisation subject to the total transmitted power of relays for a typical wireless network with distributed beamforming is presented. It is desirable to maximise receiver quality-of-service (QoS) and also to minimise the cost of transmission in terms of power. Hence, these two optimisation problems are very common and have been addressed separately in the literature. It is shown that SNR maximisation subject to power constraint and power minimisation subject to SNR constraint yield the same results for a typical wireless network. It proves that either one of the optimisation approaches is sufficient.

Modeling nitrous oxide emissions from irrigated agriculture : testing DayCent with high-frequency measurements

A unique high temporal frequency dataset from an irrigated cotton-wheat rotation was used to test the agroecosystem model DayCent to simulate daily N2O emissions from sub-tropical vertisols under different irrigation intensities. DayCent was able to simulate the effect of different irrigation intensities on N2O fluxes and yield, although it tended to overestimate seasonal fluxes during the cotton season. DayCent accurately predicted soil moisture dynamics and the timing and magnitude of high fluxes associated with fertilizer additions and irrigation events. At the daily scale we found a good correlation of predicted vs. measured N2O fluxes (r2 = 0.52), confirming that DayCent can be used to test agricultural practices for mitigating N2O emission from irrigated cropping systems. A 25 year scenario analysis indicated that N2O losses from irrigated cotton-wheat rotations on black vertisols in Australia can be substantially reduced by an optimized fertilizer and irrigation management system (i.e. frequent irrigation, avoidance of excessive fertiliser application), while sustaining maximum yield potentials.

The role and future challenges of wireless communication networks for cooperative autonomous city vehicles

This paper elaborates on the use of future wireless communication networks for autonomous city vehicles. After addressing the state of technology, the paper explains the autonomous vehicle control system architecture and the Cybercars-2 communication framework; it presents experimental tests of communication-based real-time decision making; and discusses potential applications for communication in order to improve the localization and perception abilities of autonomous vehicles in urban environments.

Vision based guidance for robot navigation in agriculture

This paper describes a novel vision based texture tracking method to guide autonomous vehicles in agricultural fields where the crop rows are challenging to detect. Existing methods require sufficient visual difference between the crop and soil for segmentation, or explicit knowledge of the structure of the crop rows. This method works by extracting and tracking the direction and lateral offset of the dominant parallel texture in a simulated overhead view of the scene and hence abstracts away crop-specific details such as colour, spacing and periodicity. The results demonstrate that the method is able to track crop rows across fields with extremely varied appearance during day and night. We demonstrate this method can autonomously guide a robot along the crop rows.

Finite-SNR diversity-multiplexing trade-off of inter-vehicular cooperative diversity protocols

The finite-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) diversity-multiplexing trade-off (DMT) of cooperative diversity protocols are investigated in vehicular networks based on cascaded Rayleigh fading. Lower bounds of DMT at finite SNR for orthogonal and non-orthogonal protocols are derived. The results showcase the first look into the achievable DMT trade-off of cooperative diversity in volatile vehicular environments. It is shown that the diversity gains are significantly suboptimal at realistic SNRs.

Detection of dynamic primary user with cooperative spectrum sensing

In this paper we demonstrate that existing cooperative spectrum sensing formulated for static primary users cannot accurately detect dynamic primary users regardless of the information fusion method. Performance error occurs as the sensing parameters calculated by the conventional detector result in sensing performance that violates the sensing requirements. Furthermore, the error is accumulated and compounded by the number of cooperating nodes. To address this limitation, we design and implement the duty cycle detection model for the context of cooperative spectrum sensing to accurately calculate the sensing parameters that satisfy the sensing requirements. We show that longer sensing duration is required to compensate for dynamic primary user traffic.

Further investigations of framing effects on cooperative choices in a provision point mechanism

We investigate whether framing effects of voluntary contributions are significant in a provision point mechanism. Our results show that framing significantly affects individuals of the same type: cooperative individuals appear to be more cooperative in the public bads game than in the public goods game, whereas individualistic subjects appear to be less cooperative in the public bads game than in the public goods game. At the aggregate level of pooling all individuals, the data suggests that framing effects are negligible, which is in contrast with the established result.

Designing for grassroots food production : an event-based urban agriculture community

As urbanisation of the global population has increased above 50%, growing food in urban spaces increases in importance, as it can contribute to food security, reduce food miles, and improve people’s physical and mental health. Approaching the task of growing food in urban environments is a mixture of residential growers and groups. Permablitz Brisbane is an event-centric grassroots community that organises daylong ‘working bee’ events, drawing on permaculture design principles in the planning and design process. Permablitz Brisbane provides a useful contrast from other location-centric forms of urban agriculture communities (such as city farms or community gardens), as their aim is to help encourage urban residents to grow their own food. We present findings and design implications from a qualitative study with members of this group, using ethnographic methods to engage with and understand how this group operates. Our findings describe four themes that include opportunities, difficulties, and considerations for the creation of interventions by Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) designers.

Reducing rear-end crashes with cooperative systems

This paper presents an evaluation of the effectiveness of a cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) to reduce rear-end crashes. Two complementary simulation techniques are used to demonstrate the benefits of the C-ITS. A traffic (VEINS) and sensor (SiVIC) simulations use realistic data related to traffic/road in Brisbane’s Pacific Motorway, driver’s reaction time and injury severity to evaluate benefits. The results of our simulations show that C-ITS could reduce rear-end crash risk by providing several seconds of additional warning to drivers.