By Peter Stoyko
Complex systems are difficult to understand without the
aid of visuals. There are too many moving parts to mentally
keep track of. The parts interact in too many ways. The whole
system is cognitively overwhelming insofar as it cannot be
absorbed in one go without the aid of an external reference.
That is partly due to humans' inability to juggle more than
a few complicated ideas in working memory at one time.
Thus, visuals are a simplifying and organizing device that
complements the way human naturally think if they are
designed well. This poster is an early glimpse of a larger
project (called SystemViz) that explores what it means to
design such visuals well.
In today’s rapidly changing world, organizations and societies are struggling with the
complexity and uncertainties of emerging issues and challenges in the current dynamic
environment (Conklin, 2005; Snowden & Boone, 2007). Designers have a strategic role in
helping organizations to deal with this complexity and uncertainty by developing artefacts
that help experiencing possible futures (Maessen, van Houten, & van der Lugt, 2018).
Preliminary findings from our research showed that people with some help readily engage in
exploring far futures, yet have difficulties afterwards to distill next steps for the near future
while resisting the dominant collective pull to the comfort zone of current paradigms and
daily routines (Maessen, 2019). We therefore developed a workshop format, containing a
set of interventions and tools to guide people to engage in exploring far away possible
futures and link these back to anticipating actions in the present.
Collaboration Patterns as Building Blocks for Community InformaticsCommunitySense
Community Informatics is a wide-ranging field of inquiry and practice, with many paradigms, disciplines, and perspectives intersecting. Community Informatics research and practice build on several methodological pillars: contexts/values, cases, process/methodology, and systems. Socio-technical patterns and pattern languages are the glue that help connect these pillars. Patterns define relatively stable solutions to recurring problems at the right level of abstraction, which means that they are concrete enough to be useful, while also sufficiently abstract to be reusable. The goal of this paper is to outline a practical approach to improve CI research and practice through collaboration patterns. This approach should help to strengthen the analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation of socio-technical community systems. The methodology is illustrated with examples from the ESSENCE (E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change) community.
My Empirikom 2012 presentation in Aachen, Germany. I discuss my work with analytical constructs (genre ecologies, activity systems, activity networks), illustrating them with a case and showing how they might point to better understandings of computer-mediated communication in professional environments.
By Peter Stoyko
Complex systems are difficult to understand without the
aid of visuals. There are too many moving parts to mentally
keep track of. The parts interact in too many ways. The whole
system is cognitively overwhelming insofar as it cannot be
absorbed in one go without the aid of an external reference.
That is partly due to humans' inability to juggle more than
a few complicated ideas in working memory at one time.
Thus, visuals are a simplifying and organizing device that
complements the way human naturally think if they are
designed well. This poster is an early glimpse of a larger
project (called SystemViz) that explores what it means to
design such visuals well.
In today’s rapidly changing world, organizations and societies are struggling with the
complexity and uncertainties of emerging issues and challenges in the current dynamic
environment (Conklin, 2005; Snowden & Boone, 2007). Designers have a strategic role in
helping organizations to deal with this complexity and uncertainty by developing artefacts
that help experiencing possible futures (Maessen, van Houten, & van der Lugt, 2018).
Preliminary findings from our research showed that people with some help readily engage in
exploring far futures, yet have difficulties afterwards to distill next steps for the near future
while resisting the dominant collective pull to the comfort zone of current paradigms and
daily routines (Maessen, 2019). We therefore developed a workshop format, containing a
set of interventions and tools to guide people to engage in exploring far away possible
futures and link these back to anticipating actions in the present.
Collaboration Patterns as Building Blocks for Community InformaticsCommunitySense
Community Informatics is a wide-ranging field of inquiry and practice, with many paradigms, disciplines, and perspectives intersecting. Community Informatics research and practice build on several methodological pillars: contexts/values, cases, process/methodology, and systems. Socio-technical patterns and pattern languages are the glue that help connect these pillars. Patterns define relatively stable solutions to recurring problems at the right level of abstraction, which means that they are concrete enough to be useful, while also sufficiently abstract to be reusable. The goal of this paper is to outline a practical approach to improve CI research and practice through collaboration patterns. This approach should help to strengthen the analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation of socio-technical community systems. The methodology is illustrated with examples from the ESSENCE (E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change) community.
My Empirikom 2012 presentation in Aachen, Germany. I discuss my work with analytical constructs (genre ecologies, activity systems, activity networks), illustrating them with a case and showing how they might point to better understandings of computer-mediated communication in professional environments.
Urban populations have been growing at an unprecedented rate around the world and there is growing concern that building-related environmental impacts also continue to rise. This has prompted a range of stakeholders in the built environment to make commitments to create and implement more sustainable building and construction solutions. Our research question thus mines this untapped potential: How might we enable widespread participation by actors in the built environment to participate in the transition toward a more circular economy? Our synthesis map focuses on the prosperous Canadian commercial building sector, and aims to empower actors within this industry to discover their unique role.
Dartmouth discussion: What's wrong with "What's wrong with CHAT?"?Clay Spinuzzi
My slide deck from the workshop portion of the 2016 Dartmouth Institute. During this portion, respondents and I discussed my paper "What's Wrong with CHAT?" This deck encapsulates the argument, but also briefly introduces activity theory and discusses its development.
Agent-Based Modeling for Sociologists is a crash course on how to build ABM in the social sciences. This presentation has an introduction to OOP and then discusses three models in details, along with their NetLogo implementation
This is the presentation of the Juan Cruz-Benito’s PhD “On data-driven systems analyzing, supporting and enhancing users’ interaction and experience” that was defended on September 3rd, 2018 in the Faculty of Sciences at University of Salamanca Spain. This PhD was graded with the maximum qualification “Sobresaliente Cum Laude”.
IS in a micro-scale democratic experiment as seen by its participantsJan Martinek
This deck, presented at BOBCATSSS 2015, accompanies a case study of the use of an information system (IS) as a component of a procedure (of a democratic experiment) designed to enhance the complexity of a public discourse and the transparency of a newly established political institution—a grants commission subsidizing students' side-projects in an university setting.
Representative democracy is defined and justified by its relation to the governed—the public. It is therefore vital to understand and confront issues that threaten to undermine that relation. Two problems that are frequently discussed are the over-simplification of complex issues in the public discourse, and overshadowing of the political under the thick veil of professional politics.
All Edge: Understanding the New Workplace NetworksClay Spinuzzi
I presented this talk to the Austin Chamber of Commerce in November 2013. How are new information and communication technologies enabling us to work together in new ways? I discuss some of the lessons from case studies I've conducted in Austin.
Secondary Design: A Case of Behavioral Design Science ResearchNauman Shahid
As user interactions have become more central to specific classes of information systems, design theorizing must
expand to support the processes of interaction and the evolution of information systems. This theorizing goes
beyond user-aided, participatory design to consider users as designers in their own right during the ongoing
creation and recreation of information systems. Recent theorizing about an emerging class of tailorable systems
proposes that such systems undergo an initial, primary design process where features are built in prior to general
release. Following implementation, people engage in a secondary design process where functions and content
emerge during interaction, modification, and embodiment of the system in use. This case study reveals that
people are engaged designers, framed by dualities in behaviors including planned and emergent behaviors,
and participatory and reifying behaviors. We contribute to design science research by extending work on
tailorable systems, investigating processes of secondary design in a highly interactive system suited to support
user engagement. We also contribute more broadly to design science research by explicitly extending
behavioral aspects associated with the use of information system artifacts.
Urban populations have been growing at an unprecedented rate around the world and there is growing concern that building-related environmental impacts also continue to rise. This has prompted a range of stakeholders in the built environment to make commitments to create and implement more sustainable building and construction solutions. Our research question thus mines this untapped potential: How might we enable widespread participation by actors in the built environment to participate in the transition toward a more circular economy? Our synthesis map focuses on the prosperous Canadian commercial building sector, and aims to empower actors within this industry to discover their unique role.
Dartmouth discussion: What's wrong with "What's wrong with CHAT?"?Clay Spinuzzi
My slide deck from the workshop portion of the 2016 Dartmouth Institute. During this portion, respondents and I discussed my paper "What's Wrong with CHAT?" This deck encapsulates the argument, but also briefly introduces activity theory and discusses its development.
Agent-Based Modeling for Sociologists is a crash course on how to build ABM in the social sciences. This presentation has an introduction to OOP and then discusses three models in details, along with their NetLogo implementation
This is the presentation of the Juan Cruz-Benito’s PhD “On data-driven systems analyzing, supporting and enhancing users’ interaction and experience” that was defended on September 3rd, 2018 in the Faculty of Sciences at University of Salamanca Spain. This PhD was graded with the maximum qualification “Sobresaliente Cum Laude”.
IS in a micro-scale democratic experiment as seen by its participantsJan Martinek
This deck, presented at BOBCATSSS 2015, accompanies a case study of the use of an information system (IS) as a component of a procedure (of a democratic experiment) designed to enhance the complexity of a public discourse and the transparency of a newly established political institution—a grants commission subsidizing students' side-projects in an university setting.
Representative democracy is defined and justified by its relation to the governed—the public. It is therefore vital to understand and confront issues that threaten to undermine that relation. Two problems that are frequently discussed are the over-simplification of complex issues in the public discourse, and overshadowing of the political under the thick veil of professional politics.
All Edge: Understanding the New Workplace NetworksClay Spinuzzi
I presented this talk to the Austin Chamber of Commerce in November 2013. How are new information and communication technologies enabling us to work together in new ways? I discuss some of the lessons from case studies I've conducted in Austin.
Secondary Design: A Case of Behavioral Design Science ResearchNauman Shahid
As user interactions have become more central to specific classes of information systems, design theorizing must
expand to support the processes of interaction and the evolution of information systems. This theorizing goes
beyond user-aided, participatory design to consider users as designers in their own right during the ongoing
creation and recreation of information systems. Recent theorizing about an emerging class of tailorable systems
proposes that such systems undergo an initial, primary design process where features are built in prior to general
release. Following implementation, people engage in a secondary design process where functions and content
emerge during interaction, modification, and embodiment of the system in use. This case study reveals that
people are engaged designers, framed by dualities in behaviors including planned and emergent behaviors,
and participatory and reifying behaviors. We contribute to design science research by extending work on
tailorable systems, investigating processes of secondary design in a highly interactive system suited to support
user engagement. We also contribute more broadly to design science research by explicitly extending
behavioral aspects associated with the use of information system artifacts.
The relevance of models in communication researchKenneth James
Model is a very important tool in any communication research. It gives a simple description of a system or structure that is used to help people understand similar systems or structure. It becomes imperative that researchers be well guided on which model they used for a particular research. This paper therefore examines relevance of communication models. The paper considers models as tool to reduce stress that is often encountered by researchers in their research work. Researchers should therefore, use appropriate communication models when explaining phenomena.
Understanding and Supporting Intersubjective Meaning Making in Socio-Technica...Sebastian Dennerlein
This dissertation will elaborate on the understanding of intersubjective meaning making by analyzing the traces of collaborative knowledge construction users leave behind in socio-technical systems. Therefore, it will draw upon more theoretical and more formal models of cognitive psychology to describe and explain the underlying process
in detail. This is done with the goal to support intersubjective meaning
making and thus elevate informal collaborative knowledge construction
in nowadays aordances of social media.
The challenges posed by the complexity of our times requires the Design discipline to understand the many complex relationships behind the social, business, technology and territory dimensions of each project. Such nature of complex systems lays not only inside design projects, but also inside the design processes that generate them, and the ability of organizing them through meta-design approaches is becoming strategic. Since the turn of the century, the design discipline has increasingly moved its scope from single users to local and online communities, from isolated projects to system of solutions. This shift has brought researchers and practitioners to investigate tools and strategies to enable mass- scale interactions by adopting several models and tools coming from software development and web-based technologies: Open Source, P2P, DDD (Diffuse, Distributed, and Decentralized) systems. This influence has matured over the years, and if we observed in the past how such systemic models can be applied in the design practice (part 1), we are facing now a new phase where Design will have an increasing role in enabling such systems through the analysis, visualization and design of their collaborative tools, platforms, processes and organizations (part 2). This scope falls into the Meta-Design domain, where designers build environments for the collaborative design of open processes and their resulting organizations (part 3). In this paper, we address this phenomena by elaborating the Open Meta-Design framework (part 4), that provides a way for designing open, collaborative and distributed processes (including those in the professional design domain). The paper positions the framework among current meta-design and design approaches and develops its features of modeling, analysis, management and visualization of processes. This framework is based on four dimensions: conceptual (describing the philosophy, context and limitations of the approach), data (describing the ontology of design processes), design (visualizing designing processes) and software (managing the connections between the ontology and the visualization, the data and design dimensions). We believe that such a framework could potentially facilitate the participation and the creation of open, collaborative and distributed processes, enabling therefore more relevant interactions for communities. As a conclusion, the paper provides a roadmap for developing and testing the Open Meta-Design framework, and therefore evaluating its relevance in supporting complex projects (part 5).
Value Creation & the Evolution of Organizational Business ModelsPaul Di Gangi
Presentation by Paul M. Di Gangi on January 31, 2011 at the Stockholm School of Economics in Second Life (SSE Island) for Robin Teigland.
This presentation outlines the key shifts in people, technology, and the economy that have led to the growth of new types of organizational business models and how value can be created.
This presentation is also available here: http://www.slideshare.net/eteigland/lecture-by-paul-digangivalue-creation
Slides from lecture by Paul DiGangi in the Strategy module in the 2011 Media Management Course at Stockholm School of Economics and the Royal Institute of Technology. Here is more information on the course: http://nordicworlds.net/2011/01/21/strategy-course-focuses-on-virtual-worlds-and-gaming-industries/.
Project relations as a Dynamic Capability @ EURAM 2010: Systemic Relations As...
Systems Dynamics in boundaries @ HaCIRIC 2010 conference Edinburgh
1. HaCIRIC 2010 The simulation model as an object between boundaries M.Kapsali, T. Bolt, S. Bayer, S. Brailsford
2. Outline - Stakeholder interaction - The boundary roles of technology - What do models do - Simulation as a social object - Ideal Types - 2 case studies - Results - Questions
3. Stakeholder interaction Different diverse communities, Healthcare complexity, cognitive distance – various backgrounds, professions, roles, levels etc. + Different interests, viewpoints and background - communication patterns = Different forms of collaboration
4. The boundary roles of technology Communication and translation artefacts between several intersecting social worlds - multi-dimensional nature - satisfy their information requirements - explore perceptions and attitudes - convey meaning and create understanding used to manipulate meaning or assert status ambiguous role since they are used subjectively
6. Simulation as a social object 1. facilitate interdisciplinarity2. used to make predictions 3. shape the conversation 4. conceptual modelling as representing reality 5. negotiating a social order
17. case studies cont.... National The goal was clear and shared Codifying the already shared knowledge The common understanding combined with the tool building focus resulted in limited use of the model as a boundary object. Local The model used to provide to stakeholders a shared imagery of the system through its RO function workshops spent time at creating the shared understanding of the problem
18. National: producing a generic tool for all PCTs Goal: "influence policy" and "make a difference“, "reflect the work we had done in this“, "Provide a tool for local authorities to make a robust business case." Group composition: "it is a reasonably small field" and so "we all knew each other" Some said model building made them "look at everything“ while others don’t see difference to other policy discussions Welcome broad participation in group (different disciplines) Model is ("looking at full spectrum of interventions") – model can communicate this to others Model can also distract because some find it difficult to understand
19. Local: producing a specific tool for one PCT Data clashed with perception of participants – learning about wider system, finding about the performance of the solutions, attention directed by modeller towards solutions Iterative process where the boundaries of the model are negotiated with participants depending on changing perceptions of the system “Three key points to help the participants use the model constructively: a well defined issue, people who have the power to make changes to take part in the process and the simplest model to address the issue.” “ ..... it is a group learning process – if you present it cold through a model without the learning process it is very difficult to own the results ......” “the model works best with those (participants) who have a whole systems view and can articulate what they see ....”
20. Results The ability of the model to serve as a boundary/epistemic object was limited by the perceived complexity of its visual representation. The role taken by the model at various points seemed to be linked to the project process- the process had an effect. Tied to the project process are the issues of consistency in participation and learning elements. Therefore it is a matter of project management handling the project group.
21. Results The less diverse and distant the group the more the representative role was successful- because the group had a common understanding of the reality of the system and common goal, did not need to negotiate it and created successfully fixed representational and technical elements in the model