Where are the Breakdowns? Surveying Unsuccessful and Failed Uses of Data
From The Theme POTENTIAL, PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY WHAT IF What if we could better understand best practices for data analytics? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We set out to illuminate the processes and practices through which individuals from diverse professional backgrounds enact data analytics. Specifically, we conducted an organizational field study to investigate how […]
Designing Technologies that Mediate Human Social Interaction: Strategies for Effective Cooperation and Collaboration
From The Theme KNOWLEDGE WORKER PRODUCTIVITY WHAT IF What if we could develop a theory of “social affordances” (properties of technologies that shape online social interaction, personal judgment, and social decision-making) to better understand and even predict the effects of media design choices on behavior? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We set out to […]
EteRNA: Accelerating Knowledge Creation for RNA Bioengineering through Internet-Scale Gaming
From The Theme KNOWLEDGE WORKER PRODUCTIVITY WHAT IF What if technical contributions from citizen scientists could be crowd sourced to accelerate scientific research? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO With the EteRNA project, we aimed to rapidly advance RNA (ribonucleic acid) bioengineering, and overcome the limits of the traditional “trial and error” design cycle within […]
Harnessing Positive Externalities in Network Services
From The Theme MOBILE AND ALTERNATIVE FORM FACTOR DEVICES WHAT IF What if we could improve wireless network services and revenues by exploring the positive, as well as negative, externalities generated by the presence of additional network users? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We set out to better understand how networks and consumers benefit […]
Interaction Archetypes in Global Teamwork (Arche)
From The Theme CONTEXTUAL FUTURES FOR SMART PERSONAL DEVICES WHAT IF? What if ubiquitous wearable sensors and smart devices could be leveraged to augment global team interaction, improve team dynamics, and unlock new team potential? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We proposed Arche, a concept-proving project aimed at uncovering interaction archetypes in global teamwork […]
Enabling Impromptu Interaction Through a Robotic Water Cooler
From The Theme CONTEXTUAL FUTURES FOR SMART PERSONAL DEVICES WHAT IF? What if we could leverage smart personal devices, and their communicative abilities, to encourage coworkers to interact with each other? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We set out to develop a personal, robot interaction platform that, through its movement and behavior, triggers individuals […]
Transparent Social Footprints
From The Theme PUBLISH ON DEMAND WHAT IF What if we could help media companies increase revenue by tracking the “social footprints” of their audiences? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We wanted to examine the requirements needed to develop prototypes for metrics and tools to support media organizations in the shift from print to […]
TweakCorps: Re-targeting Existing Webpages for Diverse Devices and Users
From The Theme PUBLISH ON DEMAND WHAT IF What if there were a machine learning algorithm that could identify and label design elements of web pages? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We focused on one popular class of semantic identifiers – those concerned with the structure (information architecture) of a page. Across webpages, there […]
Content on the Go: The Economics of the Market for Mobile Apps
From The Theme PUBLISH ON DEMAND WHAT IF What if there were a better way to price apps than pricing based on either raising revenue or raising visibility? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We studied app pricing decisions in a stylized model to ascertain the relationship between pricing decisions and market visibility. We took […]