Design-driven digital futures: The role of design-led innovation in the creation of online connected communities for new mobility solutions

Online communities have fundamentally changed how humans connected and are now so common they are fundamental to the human experience. As the Internet developed for Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the functionality of these communities has far exceeded initial expectations. These communities have shifted from simply places to share information to ways to access products and services that bridge the online and offline worlds. This shift has led to the disruption of many industries with the transportation industry being one such sector. Both private transport providers and public transport systems face competition from online communities who are able to link services providers and customers more effectively and innovatively. These types of communities fall under what has been popularised as collaborative consumption or the sharing economy. The aim of this study is to explore the role of Design-led Innovation in the creation of digital futures, specifically online connected communities for successful new mobility solutions. To explore this proposition multiple data collection methods are proposed;Content Analysis, ii) A Comparative Qualitative Study consisting of Qualitative Interviews and Focus Groups / Design Workshops and iii) An Action Research Cycle of Embedded Practice. The multidisciplinary nature of this study grounds this research in a novel position contributing to new knowledge in both the field of design, and also a deeper understanding of the larger fast-growing online community phenomena.

Constellations: A participatory, online application for research collaboration in higher education interdisciplinary courses

The research establishes a model for online learning centering on the needs of integrative knowledge practices. Through the metaphor of Constellations, the practice-based research explores the complexities of working within interdisciplinary learning contexts and the potential of tools such as the Folksonomy learning platform for providing necessary conceptual support.

Participatory media and 'co-creative' storytelling

Distinguishing critical participatory media from other participatory media forms (for example user-generated content and social media) may be increasingly difficult to do, but nonetheless remains an important task if media studies is to remain relevant to the continuing development of inclusive social political and media cultures. This was one of a number of the premises for a national Australian Research Council-funded study that set out to improve the visibility of critical participatory media, and understand its use for facilitating media participation on a population wide basis (Spurgeon et. al. 2015). The term ‘co-creative’ media was adopted to make this distinction and to describe an informal system of critical participatory media practice that is situated between major public, Indigenous and community arts, culture and media sectors. Although the co-creative media system is found to be a site of innovation and engine for social change its value is still not fully understood. For this reason, this system continues to provide media and cultural studies scholars with valuable sites for researching the sociocultural transformations afforded by new media and communication technologies, as well as their limitations.

A new creation cosmology

A new conformal creation field cosmology is considered and it is found that a negative energy scalar field nonminimally coupled to the gravitational field gives rise to creation and, in contrast to Hoyle-Narlikar theory, no a priori assumption about the rate of creation is required to solve the field equations.

Making Sense of Value and Value Co-Creation in Service Logic

In order to further develop the logic of service, value creation, value co-creation and value have to be formally and rigorously defined, so that the nature, content and locus of value and the roles of service providers and customers in value creation can be unambiguously assessed. In the present article, following the underpinning logic of value-in-use, it is demonstrated that in order to achieve this, value creation is best defined as the customer’s creation of value-in-use. The analysis shows that the firm’s and customer’s processes and activities can be divided into a provider sphere, closed for the customer, and a customer sphere, closed for the firm. Value creation occurs in the customer sphere, whereas firms in the provider sphere facilitate value creation by producing resources and processes which represent potential value or expected value-in use for their customers. By getting access to the closed customer sphere, firms can create a joint value sphere and engage in customers’ value creation as co-creators of value with them. This approach establishes a theoretically sound foundation for understanding value creation in service logic, and enables meaningful managerial implications, for example as to what is required for co-creation of value, and also further theoretical elaborations.

Visão dos trabalhadores acerca das suas condições de trabalho em um centro integrado de saúde

Pesquisa realizada em um Centro Integrado de Saúde inserido no âmbito de uma Instituição de Ensino Superior Particular, situada no Município do Rio de Janeiro. Metodologia fundamentada em uma abordagem quantitativa, não-experimental, apoiada na estatística inferencial descritiva, baseada no problema de estudo: Quais os fatores que caracterizam as condições de trabalho em um Centro Integrado de Saúde (CIS)? Teve como objetivo, analisar a visão dos trabalhadores em um Centro Integrado de Saúde acerca de suas condições de trabalho. Utilizou-se uma população constituída de 73 trabalhadores. Foram aplicados dois instrumentos: o caderno B, que consta de um questionário auto-aplicativo sobre Riscos e Danos e o caderno C que é um formulário de observação sobre as condições de trabalho de Mauro & Mauro (2009) adaptado de Boix e Vogel (1997). Os dados foram analisados através do Programa Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) versão 13.0. Na visão dos trabalhadores, os resultados em relação aos riscos (físico, químico, biológico, ergonômico e de acidente) e considerando as variáveis desconhece, não acontece, raramente e freqüentemente, os mesmos indicaram uma freqüência diversificada, embora a maior incidência esteja no grupo de risco biológico com a variável freqüentemente e nos demais a variável raramente. Quanto aos problemas de saúde evidenciados, no questionário B em ordem decrescente, os que se destacaram foram os problemas oculares; lesão por acidente; varizes; dor de cabeça; hipertensão; doenças infecciosas; lombalgias; lesão da coluna vertebral; dores musculares crônicas; problemas de articulação e estresse. Quanto aos resultados do Caderno C, através de observação pelos especialistas, os riscos são variáveis, destacando-se os riscos ergonômicos, os de acidentes e os biológicos. Conclui-se que as condições de trabalho não são satisfatórias evidenciando-se a falta de conhecimento sobre o conteúdo da investigação, assinalados as respostas na alternativa (desconhece) e da aplicação correta das medidas de prevenção de riscos ocupacionais. Recomenda-se neste sentido uma incorporação institucional dos trabalhadores valorizando a capacitação desses profissionais de saúde, com ênfase na promoção da saúde, segurança, meio ambiente de trabalho e os conhecimentos de ergonomia. Como também uma atuação integrada do Serviço Especializado em Engenharia e em Medicina do Trabalho (SESMT) com a Comissão de Biossegurança, além do incentivo à gestão participativa, educação continuada efetiva, e a criação do Comitê de Ergonomia, para a análise e intervenção das propostas.

Knowledge based strategy: appraising knowledge creation capability in organisations.

This thesis sets out a journey which culminates in the development of an analytical framework, the "Organisational Creativity Appraisal" which is intended to assist organisations in evaluating their ability to support and develop creativity. This framework is derived from the common thread of the thesis, which is drawn from a range of research and consultancy projects, and the resulting published work, spanning an eight year period, centring on the role of knowledge and creativity in the strategy and performance of organisations. The literature of strategy, learning and creativity increasingly recognises that organisational context is critical to the formation of strategy, to the content of the strategy and to its successful implementation. The thesis explores the ways in which learning and creativity, the basis of knowledge-based strategy, are influenced by organisational context or social architecture. The research explores the ways in which managers can gain greater understanding of the social architectures of their organisations so as to assist in supporting their strategic development. The central core of the thesis is the nine published papers upon which it is based but it also derives from the broader perspective of my published work in the form of both articles and books. The thesis further draws upon my own experience as a leader and manager in the context of university business schools and as a consultant, researcher and developer in the context of a range of international private and public sector organisations. The work is based upon a premise that theory should inform practice and that practice should inform theory. The "Organisational Creativity Appraisal" framework is informed by both theory and practice and is intended to assist in management practice. There is no assumption that management research can arrive at prescriptions for managerial and organisational behaviour. On the other hand management research can usefully inform management and organisational behaviour, as long as it is employed in a critically reflective manner. The "Organisational Creativity Appraisal" presented in this work should be regarded as the framework in its present form which is likely to develop further as my research progresses in the future.

Overlay Network Creation and Maintenance with Selfish Users

Overlay networks have been used for adding and enhancing functionality to the end-users without requiring modifications in the Internet core mechanisms. Overlay networks have been used for a variety of popular applications including routing, file sharing, content distribution, and server deployment. Previous work has focused on devising practical neighbor selection heuristics under the assumption that users conform to a specific wiring protocol. This is not a valid assumption in highly decentralized systems like overlay networks. Overlay users may act selfishly and deviate from the default wiring protocols by utilizing knowledge they have about the network when selecting neighbors to improve the performance they receive from the overlay. This thesis goes against the conventional thinking that overlay users conform to a specific protocol. The contributions of this thesis are threefold. It provides a systematic evaluation of the design space of selfish neighbor selection strategies in real overlays, evaluates the performance of overlay networks that consist of users that select their neighbors selfishly, and examines the implications of selfish neighbor and server selection to overlay protocol design and service provisioning respectively. This thesis develops a game-theoretic framework that provides a unified approach to modeling Selfish Neighbor Selection (SNS) wiring procedures on behalf of selfish users. The model is general, and takes into consideration costs reflecting network latency and user preference profiles, the inherent directionality in overlay maintenance protocols, and connectivity constraints imposed on the system designer. Within this framework the notion of user’s "best response" wiring strategy is formalized as a k-median problem on asymmetric distance and is used to obtain overlay structures in which no node can re-wire to improve the performance it receives from the overlay. Evaluation results presented in this thesis indicate that selfish users can reap substantial performance benefits when connecting to overlay networks composed of non-selfish users. In addition, in overlays that are dominated by selfish users, the resulting stable wirings are optimized to such great extent that even non-selfish newcomers can extract near-optimal performance through naïve wiring strategies. To capitalize on the performance advantages of optimal neighbor selection strategies and the emergent global wirings that result, this thesis presents EGOIST: an SNS-inspired overlay network creation and maintenance routing system. Through an extensive measurement study on the deployed prototype, results presented in this thesis show that EGOIST’s neighbor selection primitives outperform existing heuristics on a variety of performance metrics, including delay, available bandwidth, and node utilization. Moreover, these results demonstrate that EGOIST is competitive with an optimal but unscalable full-mesh approach, remains highly effective under significant churn, is robust to cheating, and incurs minimal overheads. This thesis also studies selfish neighbor selection strategies for swarming applications. The main focus is on n-way broadcast applications where each of n overlay user wants to push its own distinct file to all other destinations as well as download their respective data files. Results presented in this thesis demonstrate that the performance of our swarming protocol for n-way broadcast on top of overlays of selfish users is far superior than the performance on top of existing overlays. In the context of service provisioning, this thesis examines the use of distributed approaches that enable a provider to determine the number and location of servers for optimal delivery of content or services to its selfish end-users. To leverage recent advances in virtualization technologies, this thesis develops and evaluates a distributed protocol to migrate servers based on end-users demand and only on local topological knowledge. Results under a range of network topologies and workloads suggest that the performance of the distributed deployment is comparable to that of the optimal but unscalable centralized deployment.

The Self-conscious Researcher – Post-modern Perspectives of Participatory Research with Young People

Research in young people by young people is a growing trend and considered a democratic approach to exploring their lives. Qualitative research is also seen as a way of redistributing power; with participatory research positioned by many as a democratic paradigm of qualitative inquiry. Although participatory research may grant a view on another world, it is fraught with a range of relationships that require negotiation and which necessitate constant self-reflection. Drawing on experiential accounts of participatory research with young people, this paper will explore the power relationship from the perspective of the adult researcher, the young peer researcher and also that of the researched. It will explore the self-conscious exchange of power; and describe how it is relinquished and reclaimed with increasing degrees of compliance as confidence and security develops. Co-authored by a peer researcher and adult researchers, this paper will illustrate a range of practical examples of participatory research with young people, decode the power struggle and consider the implications. It will argue that although the initial stages of the research process are artificial, self-conscious and undemocratic it concludes that the end may justify the means with the creation of social agency knowledge, experience and reality.

The Self-Conscious Researcher - Post-modern Perspectives of Participatory Research with Young People

Research in young people by young people is a growing trend and considered a democratic approach to exploring their lives. Qualitative research is also seen as a way of redistributing power; with participatory research positioned by many as a democratic paradigm of qualitative inquiry. Although participatory research may grant a view on another world, it is fraught with a range of relationships that require negotiation and which necessitate constant self-reflection. Drawing on experiential accounts of participatory research with young people, this paper will explore the power relationship from the perspective of the adult researcher, the young peer researcher and also that of the researched. It will explore the self-conscious exchange of power; and describe how it is relinquished and reclaimed with increasing degrees of compliance as confidence and security develops. Co-authored by a peer researcher and adult researchers, this paper will illustrate a range of practical examples of participatory research with young people, decode the power struggle and consider the implications. It will argue that although the initial stages of the research process are artificial, self-conscious and undemocratic it concludes that the end may justify the means with the creation of social agency knowledge, experience and reality.

Modelo para a valorização partilhada da marca: a comunicação mediada por computador como suporte ao envolvimento dos recursos humanos na cocriação da marca organizacional

No atual contexto de disseminação e uso das tecnologias da comunicação para a geração de conteúdo não especializado, igualmente partilhado e utilizado, torna-se pertinente sublinhar a participação dos recursos humanos na cocriação da marca organizacional. Esta participação, todavia, encontra alguns constrangimentos e necessidades, tais como a falta de orientação no uso devido da marca gráfica, e a adequação das ferramentas comunicacionais e de gestão do conhecimento de que estes indivíduos são portadores. Neste enquadramento, pretende-se validar um modelo heurístico que explique, satisfatoriamente, de que forma as organizações podem envolver os seus recursos humanos em atividades de valorização da marca, em contextos de informação e comunicação tecnologicamente mediados, e que possa assumirse como um impulsionador da adoção destas práticas. A abordagem metodológica é de natureza exploratória, iterativa e qualitativa, assentando na Grounded Theory e, portanto, num processo indutivo de produção de conhecimento, reconhecendo a existência de momentos de descoberta e, aproximando-se do paradigma construtivista. O estudo que conduz à proposta final de um modelo de comunicação mediada por computador para a valorização da marca assenta, essencialmente, na revisão da literatura através da pesquisa bibliográfica, e num estudo de caso, que assume como procedimentos técnicos os inquéritos por entrevista, para uma primeira verificação dos pressupostos do modelo, a construção de um protótipo não-funcional de uma Central Participativa de Marca (CPM), capaz de expressar a componente tecnológica presente no modelo, e a realização de grupos focais, com o intuito de alcançar a sua validação não-experimental. O estudo de caso realizado debruça-se sobre a Universidade de Aveiro (UA) e sobre o uso e apropriação da sua marca, por parte dos membros da sua comunidade docente e não-docente. Os resultados das entrevistas exploratórias, para as quais se recorre a uma amostra por conveniência composta por entidades relevantes no que à promoção da marca da UA concerne, são combinados com os conteúdos extraídos do levantamento bibliográfico, de modo a serem contemplados tanto na aferição dos domínios de interação que informam o modelo, como na conceção do protótipo de uma plataforma de colaboração online, especificamente orientada à marca, apresentado a cinco grupos focais que neles integram a população-alvo estudada. Este estudo empírico permite uma primeira validação do modelo heurístico proposto, confirmando que a participação na cocriação de artefactos de marca tende a acontecer de forma não oficial, por falta de iniciativas organizacionais que valorizem o capital humano, e que a orientação para o uso e apropriação da marca é fundamental na concretização deste tipo de contributos, dados por indivíduos não especializados em branding, design, comunicação ou estratégia de marketing. Os resultados permitem validar ainda a configuração e a estrutura de interação propostas para o sistema subjacente ao protótipo da CPM, assim como a generalidade das suas funcionalidades, permitindo a proposta de uma heurística focada na experimentação da marca no seio organizacional. Finalmente, são identificadas linhas de investigação futura nesta área, decorrentes dos resultados alcançados e das limitações do estudo realizado.

The Development of Environmental Assessment Tools to Support the Creation of Dementia Friendly Care Environments: Innovative Practice

The need for more dementia friendly design in hospitals and other care settings is now widely acknowledged. Working with 26 NHS Trusts in England as part of a Department of Health commissioned programme, The King’s Fund developed a set of overarching design principles and an environmental assessment tool for hospital wards in 2012. Following requests from other sectors, additional tools were developed for hospitals, care homes, health centres and housing with care. The tools have proven to be effective in both disseminating the principles of dementia friendly design and in enabling the case to be made for improvements that have a positive effect on patient outcomes and staff morale. This paper reports on the development,use and review of the environmental assessment tools, including further work that is now being taken forward by The Association for Dementia Studies, University of Worcester.

Replicating the Networking, Mentoring and Venture Creation Benefits of Entrepreneurship Centres on a Shoestring: A Student-centred Approach to Entrepreneurship Education and Venture Creation

As support for both university-level entrepreneurial education and the use of experiential learning methods to foster student entrepreneurs increases, so too have the number of university-established or affiliated entrepreneurship centers. The activity at the center of this study aimed to combine experiential learning methods with assets associated with entrepreneurship centers, including venture creation, networking, and mentoring. Students were invited to participate in a competition wherein they were guided through the business creation process and pitched their ideas to investor judges who chose the winner and provided capital start-up funding and consulting. This research puts forth that university faculty at institutions without entrepreneurship centers can organize experiences to provide the benefits of entrepreneurship centers. The study used interviews to find that many of the benefits of entrepreneurship centers were able to be replicated using this method. The project is outlined, outcomes are analyzed, and the results and lessons learned are discussed.

A framework for real time MMO game content generation

Com o aumento de plataformas móveis disponíveis no mercado e com o constante incremento na sua capacidade computacional, a possibilidade de executar aplicações e em especial jogos com elevados requisitos de desempenho aumentou consideravelmente. O mercado dos videojogos tem assim um cada vez maior número de potenciais clientes. Em especial, o mercado de jogos massive multiplayer online (MMO) tem-se tornado muito atractivo para as empresas de desenvolvimento de jogos. Estes jogos suportam uma elevada quantidade de jogadores em simultâneo que podem estar a executar o jogo em diferentes plataformas e distribuídos por um "mundo" de jogo extenso. Para incentivar a exploração desse "mundo", distribuem-se de forma inteligente pontos de interesse que podem ser explorados pelo jogador. Esta abordagem leva a um esforço substancial no planeamento e construção desses mundos, gastando tempo e recursos durante a fase de desenvolvimento. Isto representa um problema para as empresas de desenvolvimento de jogos, e em alguns casos, e impraticável suportar tais custos para equipas indie. Nesta tese e apresentada uma abordagem para a criação de mundos para jogos MMO. Estudam-se vários jogos MMO que são casos de sucesso de modo a identificar propriedades comuns nos seus mundos. O objectivo e criar uma framework flexível capaz de gerar mundos com estruturas que respeitam conjuntos de regras definidas por game designers. Para que seja possível usar a abordagem aqui apresentada em v arias aplicações diferentes, foram desenvolvidos dois módulos principais. O primeiro, chamado rule-based-map-generator, contem a lógica e operações necessárias para a criação de mundos. O segundo, chamado blocker, e um wrapper à volta do módulo rule-based-map-generator que gere as comunicações entre servidor e clientes. De uma forma resumida, o objectivo geral e disponibilizar uma framework para facilitar a geração de mundos para jogos MMO, o que normalmente e um processo bastante demorado e aumenta significativamente o custo de produção, através de uma abordagem semi-automática combinando os benefícios de procedural content generation (PCG) com conteúdo gráfico gerado manualmente.

Web based content and hybrid teaching: student perceptions of the effectiveness of using web based content and hyper-linked teaching units in teaching hybrid business and marketing post secondary classes /

This exploratory, descriptive action research study is based on a survey of a sample of convenience consisting of 172 college and university marketing students, and 5 professors who were experienced in teaching in an internet based environment. The students that were surveyed were studying e-commerce and international business in 3^^ and 4*'' year classes at a leading imiversity in Ontario and e-commerce in 5^ semester classes at a leading college. These classes were taught using a hybrid teaching style with the contribution of a large website that contained pertinent text and audio material. Hybrid teaching employs web based course materials (some in the form of Learning Objects) to deliver curriculimi material both during the attended lectures and also for students accessing the course web page outside of class hours. The survey was in the form on an online questionnaire. The research questions explored in this study were: 1. What factors influence the students' ability to access and learn from web based course content? 2. How likely are the students to use selected elements of internet based curriculum for learning academic content? 3. What is the preferred physical environment to facilitate learning in a hybrid environment? 4. How effective are selected teaching/learning strategies in a hybrid environment? The findings of this study suggest that students are very interested in being part of the learning process by contributing to a course web site. Specifically, students are interested in audio content being one of the formats of online course material, and have an interest in being part of the creation of small audio clips to be used in class.