Der Rector und Senat der Königlichen Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität dem Herrn Geheimen Rathe und Professor D. Friedrich von Thiersch zur Feier seines fünfzigjährigen Doctor-Jubilaeums am 18 Juni 1858 : mit einer Abhandlung des Professors von Lasaulx über die prophetische Kraft der menschlichen Seele in Dichtern und Denkern

Die prophetische Kraft der menschlichen Seele in Dichtern und Denkern

Bericht von der Königlichen zootomischen anstalt zu Würzburg.

Editors: 1847/48 (2. bericht) Albert Köliker.

Magistri Petri Poponis Colloquia de scholis Herbipolensibus : ein beitrag zur vorgeschichte der Würzburger Hochschule als festgabe zu deren dreihundertjährigem jubiläum aus einer handschrift des XV. jahrunderts erstmals herausg. /

Mode of access: Internet.

Ueber die Einwirkungsprodukte von Phosphorpentachlorid auf Succinanil und Dichlormaleinanil /

Thesis (doctoral)--Koniglich Bayerische Julius-Maximilians-Universitat zu Wurzburg, 1892.

Die bedeutung der Konstitution für die entstehung von Krankheiten ...

"Festrede zur feier des Dreihundert-fünfunddreissighährigen Bestehens der Königl. Julius-Maximilians-Universität zu Würzburg gehalten am 11. mai 1917."

Designing mobile systems for social navigation in urban public places

This thesis presents social requirements and design considerations from a study evaluating interactive approaches to social navigation and user-generated information sharing in urban environments using mobile devices. It investigates innovative ways to leverage mobile information and communication technology in order to provide a social navigation platform for residents and visitors in and for public urban places. Through a design case study this work presents CityFlocks, a mobile information system that offers an easy way for information-seeking new residents or visitors to access tacit knowledge from local people about their new community. It is intended to enable visitors and new residents in a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents in order to gather information about their new environment. Its design specifically aims to lower existing barriers of access and facilitate social navigation in urban places. In various user tests it evaluates two general user interaction alternatives – direct and indirect social navigation – and analyses which interaction method works better for people using a mobile device to socially navigate urban environments. The outcomes are relevant for the user interaction design of future mobile information systems that leverage the social navigation approach.

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.

Local Commons : communicating local issues through place-based interventions

Due to the numerous possibilities of voicing concerns and the flood of data we are exposed to, local issues are at a risk of being overlooked. Following a research agenda proposed by Foth et al. (2013), this thesis explored the possible contributions of situated digital and tangible media for communicating local issues. Making use of the location of an issue could thereby not only allow to reach the targeted audience but also for a deeper involvement of citizens. Through the development of a design intervention in public space, called Local Commons, the benefits of this approach were investigated. Therefore, the intervention combined digital and tangible media in order to engage the public to contribute and debate different perspectives on a given local issue. The interaction with the intervention was thereby twofold. First, the intervention invited the audience to submit images of their perspectives on the issue, which were displayed on a public screen. Via tangible buttons in front of the screen, the audience then had the possibility to agree or disagree to the displayed perspectives, creating a space for deliberation. In a field study, the concept was subsequently tested and evaluated. The results of this study, although not generalisable, supported the chosen approach of this thesis.

Vote with your feet : hyperlocal public polling for urban screens

Technological advances have led to an ongoing spread of public displays in urban areas. However, they still mostly show passive content such as commercials and digital signage. Researchers took notice of their potential to spark situated civic discourse in public space and have begun working on interactive public display applications. Attracting people’s attention and providing a low barrier for user participation have been identified as major challenges in their design. This thesis presents Vote With Your Feet, a hyperlocal public polling tool for urban screens allowing users to express their opinions. Similar to vox populi interviews on TV or polls on news websites, the tool is meant to reflect the mindset of the community on topics such as current affairs, cultural identity and local matters. It shows one Yes/No question at a time and enables users to vote by stepping on one of two tangible buttons on the ground. This user interface was introduced to attract people’s attention and to lower participation barriers. Vote With Your Feet was informed by a user-centred design approach that included a focus group, expert interviews and extensive preliminary user studies in the wild. Deployed at a bus stop, Vote With Your Feet was evaluated in a field study over the course of several days. Observations of people and interviews with 30 participants revealed that the novel interaction technology was perceived as inviting and that Vote With Your Feet can spark discussions among co-located people.

Tangible E-Learning

Tangible User Interfaces increasingly gain attention for their supportive potential in cognitive processes. More and more often the terms e-Learning and tangible interaction are been referred to in one word as Tangible e-Learning. This paper gives a general overview on the topic in reference to development history, research and effectiveness. It explains how epistemology, together with its idea that physicality enhances learning and that the cognitive process can happen in expressive or exploratory manner, motivates the emerging of TUIs and acts as a basis for the classification of Tangible e-Learning Systems. The benefits of TUIs in comparison to classical GUIs in terms of their contribution to the learning process, engagement, enjoyment and collaboration are empirically proven, although poorly. Nevertheless, it is not known whether TUIs have stronger potential than common Physical User Interfaces that are not electronically augmented. Still, TUIs that support learning have a strong potential to be integrated into real world scenarios.

DoGood : A gamified mobile app to promote civic engagement

The rise of the mobile Internet enables the creation of applications that provide new and easier ways for people to organise themselves, raise issues, take action and interact with their city. However, a lack of motivation or knowledge often prevents many citizens from regularly contributing to the common good. Therefore, this thesis presents DoGood, a smartphone app, that aims at motivating citizens to carry out civic activities. The thesis asks what kinds of activities citizens consider to be civic and to what extent gamification can motivate users in this context. The DoGood app uses gamified elements to encourage citizens to submit and promote their civic activities as well as to join the activities of others. Gamification is sometimes criticized for simply adding a limited number of game elements, such as leaderboards, on top of an existing experience. However, in the case of the DoGood app, the process of game design was an integral part of the development, and the gamified elements target the user’s intrinsic motivations instead of providing them with an external reward. DoGood was implemented as hybrid mobile app and deployed to citizens of Brisbane in a five weeks long user study. The app successfully motivated most of its users to do more civic activities and its gamified elements were well received. Based on the results of the user study, civic activities can be defined as activities that give citizens the opportunity to become involved and improve life in their local community.

Serendipitous road trips: Enhancing tourists’ experiences through social interaction

Driving can be a lonely activity. While there has been a lot of research and technical inventions concerning car-to-car communication and passenger entertainment, there is still little work concerning connecting drivers. Whereas tourism is very much a social activity, drive tourists have few options to communicate with fellow travellers. The proposed project is placed at the intersection of tourism and driving and aims to enhance the trip experience during driving through social interaction. This thesis explores how a mobile application that allows instant messaging between travellers sharing similar context can add to road trip experiences. To inform the design of such an application, the project adopted the principle of the user-centred design process. User needs were assessed by running an ideation workshop and a field trip. Findings of both studies have shown that tourists have different preferences and diverse attitudes towards contacting new people. Yet all participants stressed the value of social recommendations. Based on those results and a later expert review, three prototype versions of the system were created. A prototyping session with potential end users highlighted the most important features including the possibility to view user profiles, choose between text and audio input and receive up-to-date information. An implemented version of the prototype was evaluated in an exploratory study to identify usability related problems in an actual use case scenario as well as to find implementation bugs. The outcomes of this research are relevant for the design of future mobile tourist guides that leverage from benefits of social recommendations.