Barbara Rita Barricelli

Designing for End-User Development in the Internet of Things

With the widespread of Internet of Things’ devices, sensors, and applications the quantity of collected data grows enormously and the need of extracting, merging, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing it paves the way for new research challenges. This ongoing revolution of how personal devices are used and how they are becoming more and more wearable has important influences on the most well established definitions of end user and end-user development. The paper presents an analysis of the most diffused applications that allow end users to aggregate quantified-self data, originated by several sensors and devices, and to use it in personalized ways. From the outcomes of the analysis, we present a classification model for Internet of Things and new EUD paradigm and language that extends the ones existing in the current state of the art Internet of Things.

Visual mediation mechanisms for collaborative design and development

Collaborative design involving end users has emerged as a response to the needs felt by various organizations of adapting software to specific environments and users. During time, users and environments evolve; this is another reason why software has to be modified. Different stakeholders, including consultants, designers internal to the organization and, recently, end users, have to collaborate among themselves, and possibly with the software providers, to shape software. Such stakeholders face fundamental challenges in learning how to communicate and in building a shared understanding. Researchers are now addressing such challenges. This paper contributes to this innovative research by formally defining visual mediation mechanisms for collaborative design. A case study illustrating their application is discussed.

An ontology-based approach to product customization

Mass customization refers to the increase in variety and customization of the manufactured products and services. It is now economically feasible thanks to the availability of computer-aided manufacturing systems, which allow people to customize standard products, and to Internet, through which many online retailers now operate, thus eliminating the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution that, in past years, prevented the production of niche products because of their high production costs. To permit mass customization, several software-based product configurators are available on the Web: they guide people in adapting a product to their needs and desires. A drawback of such configurators is the limited range of changes permitted. We present in this paper a system that gives people more freedom in creating products that best fit their desires, thanks to the use of an ontology, which models the possible product compositions that users can perform. The proposed solution is shown through a case study, which refers to furniture production.

Collaborative Environments: Accessibility and Usability for Users with Special Needs

Accessibility and usability are relevant characteristics when considering the design and development of interactive environments especially when the target users have different forms of disability. Guaranteeing the inclusion of such characteristics poses new challenges in Web 2.0 collaborative environments because their users can have the role of both producers and consumers of information (the produsers of information). The purpose of this chapter is to specify the expected characteristics of accessible and usable collaborative systems tailored for produsers who have special needs. Hence, usability models are reviewed and the W3C guidelines and approaches for guaranteeing accessibility are reported. Then an accessible e-learning wiki-based environment is presented and, finally, a specific usability model is proposed that could overcome some of the problems that have emerged when analyzing the usability of such a collaborative environment.

There's no reason why: a campaign to raise cancer awareness among adolescents.

Introduction Adolescents with cancer often experience a longer diagnostic delay than children, mainly because they take longer to go to a doctor. The Italian Society for Adolescents with Oncohematological Diseases (SIAMO) has launched an information campaign focusing on raising adolescents’ awareness of the importance of diagnosing cancer early. Methods The concepts of the campaign were developed by a scientific committee of clinicians, cancer patients and their parents, and marketing experts. The title of the campaign is “Theres no reason why”. A video has been launched on TV channels and the Internet, and the final frame refers viewers to the SIAMO website, which provides advice to help adolescents interpret any symptoms they experience. Results The video has had 12,181 views. In the 6 months following the launch of the campaign, the SIAMO website page dedicated to the campaign was opened by 9,767 viewers for a total of 13,632 views. Conclusions Though it remains very difficult to judge the efficacy of this initiative, the value of a campaign focusing on improving the adolescent populations cancer awareness is supported by the large number of studies published on the diagnostic delay in this age group. Our campaign goes to show the importance of ensuring cooperation between the different stakeholders involved in the global care of adolescents with cancer.

Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age: Coping with Information, Participation, and Collaboration Overload

The spread of social computing, cloud computing, Internet of Things, and co-creation tools pushes the use of technology toward a more social dimension and toward the creation of enormous quantity of data. Cultures of participation aims at providing end users that are not experts in computer science nor have the skills specific to the domain at hand, with tools to actively participate and solve problems that are personally meaningfully to them, without necessarily the intervention of skilled professionals. The CoPDA Workshop is in its third edition, after the first one that was held in 2013 during the International Symposium on End-User Development (IS-EUD) in Copenhagen (Denmark)[1] and the second one held in 2014 during the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) [2]. This edition focuses on problems, tools, techniques and strategies for coping with information, participation, and collaboration overload.

A habitable space for supporting creative collaboration

The complexity and the increasing scale of design projects require stakeholders from different disciplines to collaborate together. This paper addresses the challenge of bridging communication gaps raised during collaborative design activities, with a meta-design socio-technical approach — namely, design for participation and creative collaboration — leading to an evolutionary process. Based experience derived from a Software Shaping Workshop (SSW), we propose a novel hive mind space (HMS). This model introduces a boundary zone, serving as a communication channel allowing Communities of Practice (CoPs) to create and exchange knowledge. Thus, as opposed to being excluded from the design process, the CoPs can actively participate in the design activity and perform their tasks collaboratively and creatively. We describe the structure of the hive mind space and propose a possible way to implement it into a case study example — the Valchiavenna Museum.

Culture of participation in the digital age: social computing for learning, working, and living

Cultures of participation are oriented towards providing end users with the means to actively participate in problems that are personally meaningfully to them. An overall aim of cultures of participation is to apply collective knowledge to address major problems that our societies are facing today. The CoPDA Workshop is in its second edition, after the first one that was held in 2013 during the International Symposium on End-User Development in Copenhagen (Denmark) [4]. In the 2014s edition the focus is on social computing and its contributions to learning, working and living.

Human Work Interaction Design. Work Analysis and Interaction Design Methods for Pervasive and Smart Workplaces

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th IFIP WG 13.6 Working Conference on Human Work Interaction Design, HWID 2015, held in London, UK, in June 2015. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers reflect many different areas and address many complex and diverse work domains,focusing on the integration of work analysis and interaction design methods for pervasive and smart workplaces. They are organized in the following sections: methodologies; environment, and specific contexts.

MikiWiki: a meta wiki architecture and prototype based on the hive-mind space model

This paper presents MikiWiki, a meta-wiki developed to prototype key aspects of the Hive-Mind Space (HMS) model. The HMS model has been proposed to share the visions of End-User Development and meta-design in collaborative online environment development. It aims to support cultures of participation and to tackle the co-evolution of users and systems. The model provides localized habitable environments for diverse stakeholders and tools for them to tailor the system under design, allowing the co-evolution of systems and practices. MikiWiki is aimed at supporting the exploration of opportunities to enable software tailoring at use time. Such an open-ended collaborative design process is realized by providing basic building blocks as boundary object prototypes, allowing end users to remix, modify, and create their own boundary objects. Moreover, MikiWiki minimizes essential services at the server-side, while putting the main functionalities on the client-side, opening the whole system to its users for further tailoring.