Week 21

CMT: 10th March ‘08

For our usual seminar session today, we had to attend a workshop on “Soft Technology, Creativity, and Innovation”

WORKSHOP – School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, London

VENUE: Room WG17, Williams Building, Hendon Campus, 13:15-17:00

Organiser: Satinder P. Gill Senior Research Fellow, School of Computing Science, university sattisan@yahoo.com

Soft technology examines the symbiotic relationship between technology, creativity and innovation that builds on the societal knowledge (social, cultural, institutional) and utilises this to design processes, products and services for sustainable innovation. The importance of understanding and applying the concept of Soft Technology is nowhere more apparent than in China. China is currently faced with the challenge of leapfrogging towards a knowledge society where culture becomes crucial. The workshop will introduce the concept of Soft Technology and explore its implications for the future of China in the globalising world, and it will discuss the importance of the cultural heritage industries and human centred innovation within broader contexts of Soft Technology.

Workshop Chair: Martin Loomes Dean of School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, London.13:15-13:30

Introduction: Satinder P. Gill13:30-14:00 Plenary Talk: “Soft Technology— The Source ofCreativity in the 21st Century”

Speaker: Zhouying JIN Director, Center for Technology Innovation and Strategy Studies of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; President, Beijing Academy ofSoft Technology, China.

Discussion14:15-14:35 “New Business Model & Corporate Responsibility”Speaker: Shihong HAN Chairman of the board, Beijing Meridian Sun Co. Ltd., China.

Discussion14:45-15:00

Tea Break

Workshop Chair: Zhouying JIN15:00-15.20 “Boundaries of Cultural Heritage Industries”

Speaker: David Smith Professor and Director of Research, Newport College of Art, Media and Design, Wales.

Discussion15:30-15.50 “Human-Centred Innovation”

Speaker: William Wong Director: Centre for Interaction Design, School of Computing Science,Middlesex University. London.

Discussion16:00-16:30 Reflections on Soft Technology and Future Collaborations

Closing Remarks

Biography Prof. Zhouying Professor Zhouying Jin is a senior researcher and professor of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences(CASS); Director of Center for Technology Innovation and Strategy Studies (CTISS) of CASS; President and Founder of the Beijing Academy of Soft Technology.

She has been visiting professor of Case Western Reserve University and University of Nebraska-Lincoln, U.S.A(1993-1994); Senior Research Fellow, Institute For The Future (U.S. CA, Menlo Park 1996); Special researcher, Institute of Science and Technology policy of Japan (2002); and Visiting Professor of University of Aix-Marseille III of France(2003).

For the past ten years, she has focused her research on “soft technology”. She was invited to attend the First ‘Festival of Thinkers’ as one of ten selected World Thinkers with ten Nobel Laureates in 2005.

She is also Chairman and founder of the Future 500(China) devoted to stakeholder engagement to maximizing the “the triple bottom line” in China. The Future 500 mechanism is aiming to improving sustainability and harmonizing economic profits with social and environmental benefits in enterprises dimensions. She holds two personal copyrights on Enterprises Evaluation and Benefit & Risk Evaluating System for Technological Project.

PDE: 14th March ‘08

Today’s Interaction Design practice session was held as usual, I could not attend for some personal reasons. On enquiring from colleagues, I understand that it was presentations and supervisory advice on individual projects as usual.

Week 20

CMT: 2nd March ‘08

Today’s Current Issues in Interaction session coordinator Paola urged the team members present today to engage more with the weekly tasks that she gives out.

Further to that, she complained about lack of attendance and cohesion amongst members in her sessions, she said such attitude will stunt classmates’ general progress, explaining the purpose of commitment and broader view learning to encompass complex domains

“How do you design a system that identifies problems, and then define the solutions”.

“Cognitive psychology is only limited to the individual.”

PDE: 7th March ‘08

We started today quite abruptly; David already started presentation about his lead user innovation/ social networking / application/ Toolkit project. At the end, it was suggested that he can make today’s advice more useful by concentrating his effort towards narrowing down his idea to a more time realistic one.

Although I was meant to show some stuff on “service ecology”, also called map of relationships between stakeholders’ and the product/ service, plus persona’s. I was rather focused on generating more design ideas and visiting similar websites to the one I am working on. I eventually ended up showing a presentation on service design plan, project vision, who what and why design, and activity list. Andy and Bob gave examples of persona’s, and what is service ecology, they requested me to produce some flow of values and persona’s relevant to my project by next session.

In the afternoon meeting after the break, Dik-AR in architectural building developments- had a discussion on measurements, space, distance and the possibility of moving the camera around the cubes (building blocks) to capture a richer view of the area.

Madu had a talk relating to her drum sequencer, Andy told her that she must identify who, what and why’s of her design project.

Halil also got a feedback based on the presentation he showed the class. Furthermore, he also experienced some practical methods for collating and processing ideas for his AR game project.

Week 19

CMT: 25th Feb ‘08

This session rolled off with talks on human factor in the paper: There Is More to Monitoring a Nuclear Power Plant than Meets the Eye. By Randall J. Mumaw, Emilie M. Roth, Kim J. Vicente, Catherine M. Burns. Attached below:there-is-more-to-monitoring-a-nuclear-power-plant-than-meets-the-eye.doc

Paola talked about the nature of monitoring practice and implications for modelling: Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) operators are engaged in a number of tasks “Monitoring is interweaved with other ongoing responsibilities of managing tasks to generate power” pg. 37
Paola comment: Hypothesis: knowing the structural relations among these other tasks might reveal possible integration patterns. But we do not hear about this.

“Cognitive” hypothesis focused on selected processes are inadequate

• primary challenge to monitoring is operator vigilance;

• the primary demands in monitoring relate to selective attention;

• major difficulty in monitoring is one of visual perception;

• None of these hypotheses does justice to the richness of the phenomena we observed.

She further observed that individual recognition in interacting with the device also affects the way they translate the alarms. She noted that the designers have assumed the efficiency and effectiveness of the system/plant without any major emphasis on managerial or historical factors.The paper challenges that devices can not be designed based on individual cognition.

The meaning of monitoring these values and understanding the interactions among states of the components, and other variables. Absolute values does exist in isolation, there should be an understanding in relation to others.

PDE: 29th Feb’08

Started as usual with a little natter before getting into the main business of the day, Andy and Bob was early trying to connect and steady the cameras, display unit the laptop ready to support/ enable project presentations.

Dikshit presented his progress on the augmented reality in architecture project; he talked about how to install multiple markers in one exe file, and how to change the colours, size and shape of the AR building blocks.

After the lunch break, Anoi briefly presented his EPG (electronic programme guide). Then I explained to the team that in order to extract some ideas, I have applied Jakob Nielsen’s ten heuristic principles in evaluating an exiting website similar to my service design idea, I also showed my storyboard. Furthermore, I prepared a hierarchical task analysis for my project. In my feedback they advised that through my research and requirement gathering, I should lay some emphasis on service ecology, service blue print and persona.

After me was David who illustrated his project progress with some graphic presentation and an article on lead user innovation in social media.

Finally, Halil got a feedback based on what he showed the team, same as Madushani who had already used the lunch break to get clarifications from Bob on the next line of action for her work.