Ahmet Cakir

Virtual communities: a virtual session on virtual conferences

Virtual communities supported by computers and communication facilities have existed for about two decades. Virtual meetings around the world became technically feasible once there was a sufficient number of satellites to relay data communication, and became commonplace at companies that could afford computer-mediated communication (CMC). Today, technological advances, coupled with social changes, mean that virtual communities can be useful to many people. The goal of this session is to demonstrate how virtual communities can be established and kept going using inexpensive technical means. The meeting will be held during a scientific conference on worldwide distributed work, by presenters who have organized and run at least one virtual event. It will itself be a virtual event, with contributions from Philadelphia in the west to Hong Kong in the east and South Africa in the south. The physical auditorium will be present in Berchtesgaden, a small town in the south of Germany; virtual participants may be anywhere.

Smart clothing-technology and applications

‘These socks are made for talking’ – this and some similar phrases kept flying through my mind while reading this book. Communicative underwear, buttons on my shirt that are designed to generate signals instead of keeping both sides of it together, a waistcoat with a keypad . . . When I was a kid, my mother used to buy shirts for me the fabric of which had its origin from the Far East, silk from China. This changed radically during my years as a youngster. The materials came from Germany or USA, and had been produced in chemical plants. Silk and cotton, the favourite materials of yarn, seemed doomed. Only years later, millions of hippies all over the world wore cotton cultivated in our country and woven not far from the town of my origin. Since then, there was no favourite direction the woven came from. This could change dramatically if we decide to use smart clothing – 15 out of 25 authors of the 10 chapters of the book work in Korea. If I may add another three authors working in Japan to them, I could forecast that the fabric of my future shirts will come from the Far East, the same as in my childhood. The important difference, however, will be that the raw material of yarn will neither be generated by silkworms, nor in chemical plants or on cotton fields. And the environment in which it will be woven ‘is likely to resemble a chip factory rather than a weaving mill’. The editor of the book, Gilsoo Cho, gives in the first chapter, together with two co-authors, a very comprehensive overview of the whole field. In this chapter, the distinction between wearable computing and smart clothing is outlined. In short, one can understand wearable computing as a number of devices added to clothing or attached to the body, whereas smart clothing is described as a ‘smart’ system capable of sensing and communicating with environmental and the wearer’s conditions and stimuli. Stimuli and responses can be in electrical, thermal, mechanical, chemical, magnetic or other forms. This makes clear that smart clothing means much more than filling numerous cargo pockets of a battle uniform with computer equipment or mounting electronic devices and batteries into garments. It is a technology of high complexity. Most people today do not consider producing textiles and clothing from them a complex technology. It is – and it is one of the most advanced technologies for which highly efficient technical procedures for creating the yarn and the fabric just form the starting point. Turning cotton into fashion goes far beyond that. To completely describe the topic, smart clothing, one should add the use of textiles in general because many applications dealt with in the book, e.g. body monitoring, life safety equipment, healthcare and warfare utilities, require more sophisticated types of fabric and yarn even for conventional use. The chapters of the book display methods to ‘upgrade’ textiles to smart fabric with completely new features, e.g. functions like input, output, data and power, transmission and more. User-centred design – I think, there is no other field in technology where this term fits as literally as here. In addition to the difficult task of creating new material with novel features, the developers of smart clothes need to be highly intelligent in analysing existing requirements on wearable textiles, e.g. durability against wear and tear and also washing. Especially washing constitutes a real challenge for garments with electronics integrated in them. Compared to usual textiles, a smart clothing system comprises interfaces, communication components, energy management components and integrated circuits – all formed and integrated into a whole interface almost permanently the biggest organ of the user, the skin. Its usability, extensively discussed in the book, is only a small part of the ‘Human Aspects’ that are even more extensively discussed in various parts of the book. One chapter focuses on these exclusively. With its 10 chapters, the book offers a wealth of knowledge for people who are candidates for developing this technology further. But it is also interesting for all who want to learn how to create and improve technologies. The most surprising part to me is the issue of standardisation, discussed in 30 pages, placed just after the review of the topic and the chapter on designing technology. If I may generalise my experiences with people who try to create a ‘technology’, standardisation is one of the last things one can expect to be considered by the ‘creatives’. Moreover, they use to claim that standardisation kills creativity. To include usability and ‘human aspects’ in the discussion around standardisation is even less common. Not in this book. The main strength of the book lies in the way the authors deal with a great variety of technical Behaviour & Information Technology Vol. 30, No. 2, March–April 2011, 287–288

Living and working on the Web

This award-winning module is open to all undergraduates at the University of Southampton. It is an example of how a centre of research excellence – in this case Web Science – can have a positive impact on curriculum innovation. Students carry out all their module research, interactions and assessed work online. Their personal course blogs are aggregated into the main course web site, which has become an open resource for all students interested in online identity and digital life. Twitter is also used extensively for sharing ideas and references, with the course hashtag #UOSM2033. Students are given clear guidance on academic standards for online participation and the production of digital artefacts. One assessed outcome is the production of an effective digital profile on a service such as LinkedIn.

Writing and Designing Manuals and Warnings

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Social interaction online

The last week of May 2015 witnessed a memorable conference for me. It was about living and working in digital worlds, although the title of the conference suggested the conference would be dealing with work only. The host of the event was the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the initiative of the German Federal Government ‘Industrie 4.0’. Memorable because this ministry had decided to add ‘Work’ to the five priority tasks relative to future prosperity and quality of life of the high-tech strategy of the Federal Government, a latecomer. I assume the first five have been defined by technocrats who think about working life last, if ever. The number 4.0 represents the fourth stage of the industrial revolution with the loom as the initiator of the first stage, followed by the assembly line utilised by Ford to produce the Tin Lizzie. Already stage 3 was initiated by an ICT-product, NC or ‘numerical control’ for the automation of machine tools – well before the invention of the term ICT. Back in the 1970s, the mass introduction of NC machines in the industry was one of the main reasons for introducing one of the most influential research programmes to change industrial work in the sense of humanisation by the same ministry. Now I met some survivors of that era when ergonomists, psychologists and sociologists tried to revolutionise the working life by creating ‘human’ work organisation and tools. When we exchanged news about our current activities, we were surprised that many of us were doing the same as 30 or 40 years ago, for example, introducing group work in production. For me, this issue was finished after the first successful project aiming to delete assembly lines around 1978 by colleagues from my former institute. If we need 30 years and more to implement a rather simple organisational change in production on a large scale, how long will the transition to new societies take in which work and private life are no more separated domains and people interact without physical borders and time constraints? During the conference, some speakers presented visions for the days of the far-off future, while others claimed the future had been there for some time. Both seemed to be right. And I dare to make a prediction that cannot be wrong: if you do not think of the future, it will come soon enough. And you are unlikely to find yourself on the sunny side of life. The participants of the conference displayed a remarkable difference from the participants of my earlier conferences on computerisation back in the 1970s and 1980s. While in earlier days the ICT-vendors alias EDP-manufacturers (electronic data processing) formed a block together with employers to praise the benefits of technology against the worker representatives and union people who would rather paint the future in black, this time all seemed to believe in a bright future. Both the Chairman of the Confederation of German Trade Unions and the President of the Employers’ Association seemed to join a contest in harmony even when speaking about 50% of current jobs being at stake if we fail to shape the transition to the new digital worlds. Has German angst had its day? Many people who live the future today share information through social networks. But the question is why they do it? This issue of Behaviour & Information Technology may help answer some questions. Insu Cho and Heejun Park, Department of Information and Industrial Engineering, Yonsei University, Shinchon-Dong, Seodaemoon-Gu, Seoul, Korea, and Joseph Kichul Kim, Department of Management, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA, present a study on the relationship between motivation and information sharing about products and services on Facebook. The purpose of this research was to explain the information-sharing process and investigate the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that may induce information sharing on this social network. Their research distinguishes between information-sharing intention and informationsharing behaviour using the theory of planned behaviour. Although the subjects of this study were Koreans in their 20s and 30s, I tend to believe that their behaviour is not very different from the way people in other countries behave. Information-sharing behaviour of people on the Internet differs probably more widely than was the case with paper. While paper and ink need to be paid for, the Internet gives us more space for writing than all the deserts of the planet at almost no cost. But some people prefer to accept the dictatorship of Twitter, writing no more than 140 plain letters per message. Concetta Metallo, Department of Science and Technology, and Rocco Agrifoglio, Department of Business and Economic Studies, both Parthenope University, Naples, Italy, investigated the differences between digital natives (DN), that is, the generation of those who were born and bred in the ‘digital era’, and digital immigrants (DI) in the perception of technology. I assume DI

Human Factors in Lighting

From the combination of knowledge and actions, someone can improve their skill and ability. It will lead them to live and work much better. This is why, the students, workers, or even employers should have reading habit for books. Any book will give certain knowledge to take all benefits. This is what this human factors in lighting tells you. It will add more knowledge of you to life and work better. Try it and prove it.

Human performance on the flight deck

While reading the book on Human Performance on the Flight Deck, I kept thinking about an old wisdom that ends with the words ‘Comments and criticism tell more about the speaker than about the target’. I found the text so interesting that I read the whole book without taking notes. Not very wise if one intends to write a review! No worries, I read it a second time and took many notes. In the first run, I felt like I was travelling back to my early days in school when my teacher told me that I was suitable for flying a jet fighter if well trained but the likelihood of surviving that training was not extremely high. So my mother banned that idea from our life. Only months later, the newspapers reported something which sounded like a miracle. Some scientists in the USA had allegedly found out why jet fighters in Southern Europe would crash much more often than in the USA. And the solution described was unbelievably simple, with the culprit being the missing fit between the anthropometric dimensions of the pilots and the design of the flight helmets and suits. Of course, nobody would believe the news until one day the official statistics confirmed the declining number of crashes of fighter planes. Without a systematic approach, the research work was very unlikely to precisely detect a simple cause in an environment considered ‘high tech’. Technical people tend to find a technical solution. Around two decades later, human factors people analysing the reactor incidence of Three Mile Island came up with comparably simple causes for an accident that would not only destroy an industrial plant but cripple the development of nuclear technology in the USA for more than three decades. Their methodology, however, was highly sophisticated. Reading the book, every third page reminded me of those analyses I once had to study for safety evaluations of nuclear power plants in my country. There are many other reasons for me to find the book highly interesting. First to highlight is the main approach, an integrated, systems approach that seems to have been lost and forgotten in recent years. In the public notion in many countries, ergonomics or human factors are reduced to office chairs or mice that help avoid RSI (Repetitive Strain Injuries) problems and the like. Human Factors as a discipline has come of age, not only in aviation as stated by Harris. Some would even claim that the discipline has come out of fashion. Protagonists of disciplines like UX (user experience) prefer to meet on a different plane, if not on a different planet. But from some manuscripts offered to this journal, it is easy to recognise that focusing on new and highly interesting aspects may also mean losing track of crucial things. The aviation business is an excellent example for the holistic theory, the departure point of which is the notion that the parts of any whole cannot exist and cannot be understood except in their relation to the whole. And ‘Human Performance on the Flight Deck’ is a passionate plea for saving a prominent role for HFs in aviation, not just on the flight deck. In difference to his earlier book ‘Human Factors for Civil Flight Deck Design’, the subject matter is not limited to the design of the ‘flight deck’. And this time, Harris is the author and not the editor. Harris’s ‘skimpy’ history of human factors in aviation covers almost all history of ergonomics (human factors) because one of the founders of the discipline, Al Chapanis, had started earning his stripes in aviation in the early 1940s. When he published his ‘The Chapanis Chronicles’ in 1999, 50 odd years later, the Flying Fortress B17 on the cover was not the only indication that human factors in aviation are still an issue which has yet to be fully resolved, if ever. Harris’s book is a strong plea for further developing HF as a decisive part of aviation technology instead of considering it a ‘hygiene factor’ from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Or icing on the cake, as many people think of HF. The book is organised following the five ‘M’s’model, where it is easy to recognise the meaning and importance of the last four, Machine – Mission – Management – Medium. But the first ‘M’, the ‘huMan’, reveals the origin of the model from the era of MMI (man-machine-interaction) when females were allowed to perform tasks considered male jobs only in cases of emergency, e.g. during major wars. The amendment ‘hu’ is a tribute to the new role of women in human factors terminology. Behaviour & Information Technology Vol. 31, No. 5, May 2012, 541–543

The handbook of human–machine interaction – a human centered design approach

HMI – human–machine interaction? Is it not a far cry from 1970s favourite topic of human factors? Dethroned by HCI (human–computer interaction) or respectively by CHI (computer–human interaction), HMI had started to retreat into its shell in the 1980s. Now, it is back, and Guy A. Boy, the editor of the book, explains the rationale of ‘A human-centered design approach’ in the introduction. But it seems that the ‘machine’ he has in his mind is far more than the concept of most people associated with this word. To understand this, either one needs to read the introduction of the book and the last chapter by Erik Hollnagel about the diminishing relevance of HMI or just to study the so-called ‘Machine directive’ of the European Union. According to the latter, once I have been able to qualify a nuclear power plant as a ‘machine’ without fearing that legal people could argue against it. And the word ‘machine’ as a concept is more than ambiguous in any language. What it is depends on the degree of sophistication of the tools people use in a certain environment. While in some countries a bottle opener may be called a machine, in others, even complex equipment might be named ‘tool’ as if it were a screwdriver or a hammer. In the opinion of the editor of the book the entire HCI is part of HMI. Thus, the entity with which to interact may be a very complex system. Such systems once were planned as ‘automated’ systems, very often with the machine as the leading part and humans as operators. For example, initially the automation of nuclear power plants was planned to avoid human error by locking out human impact for the first 30 min of an incident. Later, it was recognised that in most catastrophes, the operator error plays a minor role compared to design errors or management errors – the end of the 30-min for safety story. The approach of this book reflects that notion, also in the title of the conclusion chapter ‘from automation to interaction design’. What I liked most while reading the book was that the content reflects the origins and personal background and history of its 38 authors. The editor, for example, is a university professor and director of the Human-Centered Design Institute (HCDi) at the Florida Institute of Technology, his PhD and habilitation theses were written in two French universities. Another author, Grote, has received her master’s degree in psychology from a technical university in Germany, her PhD from a US-university, and works at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. A third author was born in Denmark, works presently in France, is a visiting professor in Norway, and a Professor Emeritus in Sweden. Organisational, engineering, cognitive, and social psychology, chronobiology, navigation modelling of complex Web applications – these and many more aspects, altogether an impressive list, can be found among the qualifications of the contributors. The book comprises 20 original chapters followed by a conclusion focusing on HMI. The order of the chapters resembles a design process; in Part I, methods for analysis are discussed in six chapters. The second part deals with design issues in seven chapters. Finally, in Part III, issues around the evaluation process are discussed. The chapters consider physical, cognitive, social and emotional aspects and deal with many key application domains such as aerospace, automotive, medicine and defence. Aerospace plays a major role in this book. No wonder, it is mainly about automation, but not in the sense of an automation created with the help of rigid machinery. The message it wants to convey is better characterised by the ‘Orchestra Model’ – all actors are highly skilled entities who would be able to ‘make music’ alone, but join a team under the leadership of one of them to play a beautiful symphony, a task that none of them can accomplish. I was delighted to encounter again the HABA/MABA approach (humans-are betterat/machines-are better-at) that has been used for some decades to explain the differences between the abilities of computers and humans in a new form, this time as an ‘un-Fitts list’, in this form telling why machines need people and why people create machines for. The list is commented in a chapter called ‘human–agent interaction’, very new for me although I must admit that I cannot remember how many times I had such interactions in the past few days. The chapter located physically in the middle of the book, forms in my opinion the core part of it by discussing the issue of authority and cooperation between humans and machines. The questions raised and answered here have been relevant since the first computer was assigned a job beyond being a calculating machine in the era of the mists of the computer Behaviour & Information Technology Vol. 30, No. 6, November–December 2011, 867–868