Sacha Helfenstein

Everyday appropriations of information technology: A study of creative uses of digital cameras

Repurposive appropriation is a creative everyday act in which a user invents a novel use for information technology (IT) and adopts it. This study is the first to address its prevalence and predictability in the consumer IT context. In all, 2,379 respondents filled in an online questionnaire on creative uses of digital cameras, such as using them as scanners, periscopes, and storage media. The data reveal that such creative uses are adopted by about half of the users, on average, across different demographic backgrounds. Discovery of a creative use on ones own is slightly more common than is learning it from others. Most users discover the creative uses either completely on their own or wholly through learning from others. Our regression model explains 34% of the variance in adoption of invented uses, with technology cognizance orientation, gender, exploration orientation, use frequency, and use tenure as the strongest predictors. These findings have implications for both design and marketing.

Apperception in primed problem solving.

Mental representation is a central theoretical concept in modern cognitive psychology. However, its investigation has been predominantly based on inapt perceptualist concepts, which presume that information contents in them, i.e., mental contents, solely arise from stimulus. This is in spite of the evidence that much in human thought does not have any sensory equivalence. Consequently, we make a difference between perception and apperception, as e.g., Kant and Wundt did, and argue in favor of a detailed analysis of this mental process that is responsible for the construction of representations. We present here five primed problem solving experiments. The basic idea was to demonstrate that depending on priming information people represent perceptually identical stimuli very differently, i.e., they ascribe different uses and meanings to objects and they integrate them differently to compose distinct solutions. In this vein, we demonstrate that people regularly rely on information, which is not or cannot be perceived in principle. On the ground of our empirical findings, we resurrect the issue on why the difference between perception and apperception is theoretically adequate and introduce some central concepts for the theoretical analysis of apperception such as “seeing as” and functional binding.

Emotional Business Intelligence : Enabling experience-centric business with the FeelingsExplorer

The domain of Emotional Business Intelligence (EBI) aims to support business-relevant emotional and emotion-aware decisions in addition to rational decision making. EBI originates from three root domains: Emotional Business, Emotional Intelligence and Business Intelligence (BI). In this paper we emphasize emotional empowerment of the traditional BI function; outline its main characteristics as a business working model of an emotionally smart, continuously learning organization; and introduce a first candidate of the EBI Toolkit, the FeelingsExplorer (FE). FE is a mash-up browser based on 4i (“ForEye”) technology, capable of visualizing objects in an emotional semantic space and thereby supporting decision making on emotional grounds. It takes metadata as input and visualizes the personalized “emotional similarity” of products, services, and customers. Different scenarios for FE application and overall implications of EBI for business and human technology are discussed. Decision support systems, decision making, context-aware computing, affective computing, emotive data, Business Intelligence, Customer Experience

Emotional Business Intelligence

The domain of Emotional Business Intelligence (EBI) aims to support business-relevant emotional and emotion-aware decisions in addition to rational decision making. EBI originates from three root domains: Emotional Business, Emotional Intelligence and Business Intelligence (BI). In this paper we emphasize emotional empowerment of the traditional BI function; outline its main characteristics as a business working model of an emotionally smart, continuously learning organization; and introduce a first candidate of the EBI Toolkit, the FeelingsExplorer (FE). FE is a mash-up browser based on 4i (“ForEye”) technology, capable of visualizing objects in an emotional semantic space and thereby supporting decision making on emotional grounds. It takes metadata as input and visualizes the personalized “emotional similarity” of products, services, and customers. Different scenarios for FE application and overall implications of EBI for business and human technology are discussed.