Pierre Fastrez

A collaborative approach for human-centered driver assistance systems

This paper describes an interdisciplinary research collaboration to design a human-centered driver assistance system. Driving behavior is captured using a novel intelligent vehicle test bed. The synchronized capture of driver behavior and driving context provides an empirical basis for the design and evaluation.

Editorial: Designing and evaluating driver support systems with the user in mind

In this editorial to the special issue we first introduce the field of driver support system (DSS) design and evaluation, frame it into the larger context of human-computer interaction research, and highlight some of its specificities. We then proceed to briefly present the selection of articles that compose this issue. Finally, we put the contributions to the special issue into perspective along a number of dimensions to show how they represent the diversity of current DSS research.

Personal Information Management Competences: A Case Study of Future College Students

The research project presented in this paper aims at modeling the media literacy competences required to organize and manage collections of information in the form of personal and shared digital environments. In-depth in situ interviews were conducted with future college students (N=11). During the interviews, the informants gave a guided tour of their personal space of information, and demonstrated how they used different digital tools to organize it. We identify three dimensions of personal information management (PIM) competence, based on the analysis of the way our informants describe their PIM practices by referring to and articulating (1) the constraints and affordances of the tools and devices they use, (2) the activities these tools and devices support, (3) the costs and benefits of these practices for these activities, and (4) their tastes and preferences towards them.

How is Information Literacy Related to Social Competences in the Workplace

This article reports on a work-in-progress research on media and information literacy in teamwork and distance work environments. We introduce a theoretical framework that articulates the social and informational dimensions of media and information literacy in the workplace. Based on this framework, we propose a method for investigating the relationship between information literacy and work organization in distant teamwork. This method is illustrated by preliminary data from our ongoing research project. We conclude with a necessary redefinition of the concept of information.

Le tri de cartes. Une méthode d'investigation des catégories mentales au service de l'architecture de l'information

La presente contribution entend proposer une presentation des alternatives possibles concernant l’utilisation des epreuves de tri de cartes dans un contexte de conception de systemes interactifs ou de documents numeriques. Notre presentation suit le deroulement d’une serie de tests que nous avons realises afin de guider la definition de l’architecture d’information du site web d’un departement universitaire. Au-dela de l’etat de la litterature, l’objectif est de proposer, au depart de cette experience empirique, une methode de recueil, d’analyse et d’interpretation des resultats d’epreuves de tri de cartes situee dans le paysage des pratiques existantes, combinant analyses qualitative et quantitative des donnees recueillies, dans le but de mieux cibler les representations des usagers.

A method combining deductive and inductive principles to define work-related digital media literacy competences

How to infer the digital media literacy competences of office workers related to distant teamwork from the observation of collaborative practices? This paper presents a qualitative method that combines deductive and inductive approaches to analyze interviews and observations carried out in ten organizations. From a deductive standpoint, our analysis is anchored in a review of the literature in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. From an inductive standpoint, our analyses use principles from phenomenography and grounded theory to abstract a theoretical understanding of the studied experiences. The combination of these approaches allows us to examine the way workers experience distant teamwork activities and to consider how their competences reside in their ability to frame the work situations they encounter, and to develop responses accordingly.

Managing References by Filing and Tagging

This paper presents the preliminary results of a cognitive ethnography of the personal information management (PIM) practices of five social science researchers. Based on video-recorded interviews involving guided tours of our informants’ personal digital spaces of information, we study how they create digital workspaces that support their informational activity. We introduce a semio-cognitive theoretical framework to elucidate the relationships between the users’ informational activity, the technical and semiotic properties of the software tools they use, and their conceptual models of these tools. Based on this framework, our analyses of PIM practices highlight how conceptual models play a mediation role between the affordances of the tools and the activities that they support.