Kotaro Ohori

Challenges of participatory design for social innovation a case study in aging society

The purpose of the paper is to further our understanding of conditions for participatory design (PD). We base our reflections on an ongoing project to develop new ICT concepts for social innovation to mitigate consequences of the aging society as faced by a Japanese city. MUST was chosen since it is a PD method that has been successfully applied in commercial contexts in the US and in Scandinavia. However, we found that social innovation is a complex new territory for PD, both as to project management issues and in terms of conditions for applying tools and techniques for participatory analysis and design. Especially, we found that identifying and adequately engaging stakeholders to be problematic. The diverse set of user groups, potential customers, and IT-developers could not all be defined at the start. This calls for a different type of iteration than the MUST method suggests. Further, the method presumes the involved stakeholders to be able to spend more time in the project than the stakeholders in this project could commit to.

Agent-Based Social Simulation as an Aid to Communication Between Stakeholders

Various methods provided in conventional agent-based social simulation (ABSS) research are useful for modelers and analysts in evaluating its effectiveness. We know very little about how ABSS contributes to the decision-making process for practical business problems when used by managers and employees who are not familiar with it. In this research we talked to stakeholders in two complex and uncertain business situations about using the simulation results with our models. We found that ABSS helped to promote communication between stakeholders.

Agent Based Simulation for Evaluation of Signage System Considering Expression Form in Airport Passenger Terminals and Other Large Facilities

Signage systems are installed in large facilities, such as airport passenger terminals, to help users easily move through the facility. Simulation systems for evaluating signage systems proposed so far could evaluate only information message and location arrangement from the three essential components of signage system design, which are information message, location arrangement, and expression form. We created a model to represent the sign selection and information acquisition behavior of pedestrian agents by introducing the concept of attractiveness, which can describe expression form. This simulation makes it possible to more clearly discern the effectiveness of signage system designs.

Modeling and Managing Airport Passenger Flow Under Uncertainty: A Case of Fukuoka Airport in Japan

Airport terminal decision makers in recent years need to deal with unexpected and sudden congestion situations. Although various types of mathematical researchs has analyzed the congestion situations and have succeed to manage a subsystem, they cannot sufficiently describe the variety of phenomena observed in a real airport terminal, because they have not considered the interactions between subsystems of the real airport terminal. A simulation approach enables us to describe the interactions between facilities and passenger behavior in detail as a whole airport system and to find various types of possible congestion situations. The simulation approach, however, cannot directly lead exact prediction that can be useful in practical management and operation for difficulties of modeling a complex airport terminal system and acquiring complete input data. In this paper, (1) we modeled Fukuoka airport international terminal in Japan as Complex Adaptive System and built a passenger flow simulation based on the Discrete Event Model. Validity of the model was confirmed by experiments. Moreover, (2) we confirmed that it is possible to acquire simulation input data from discussing with stakeholders using the simulation. Therefore, we believe that it is possible to reduce uncertainty of the model systematically by continuing modeling, predicting, and discussing with stakeholders, repeatedly.

Agent-Based Simulation for Evaluating Signage System in Large Public Facility Focusing on Information Message and Location Arrangement

A signage system has been installed in large-scale facilities such as airport passenger terminals and stations in order to make facility users feel good comprehensively. Agent-based models of airport terminals as a typical large-scale facility have been proposed to represent the behavioral characteristics of passengers and the essential features of signs. They, however, are not enough to evaluate signage systems, since models have not described properly pedestrian agents’ characteristics especially including their view to get information from the signs. This paper develops the simulation system that includes the model to represent a relationship between pedestrian agent’s view and its information search behavior. The primary purpose of the simulation system is to support the facility manager’s decision to design the signage system before it is actually implemented. This paper provides some evaluation results focusing on information message and location arrangement, which are part of the essential components.

The present condition and problems for elderly people participating in communities

The proportion of aged citizens in Japan has been growing and has reached the highest proportion in the world (23.1% in October, 2010 [1]). The time when we need to tackle the social welfare problem of an aging society has arrived. It has been reported that social welfare services are insufficient to reach all people who need help, resulting in 32000 lonely deaths in a single year [2]. It is difficult to solve the problem only by reforming formal care systems under conditions where the number of senior citizens is increasing and the number of younger citizens is decreasing. Community activity that supports elderly citizens is important when the proportion of aged citizens is increasing to prevent overreliance on formal care. The idea named PPK(pin-pin-korori [3]) thus emerged. This is the idea that the number of people requiring long-term care can be decreased by increasing the number of active senior citizens.