Project partners are Bea Alex, Alberto Acerbi and Gian Marco Campagnolo.

Beatrice Alex is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests are in text mining for documents from different domains as well as multi- and mixed-lingual text processing and its applications.  Her ambition is to make archives more accessible to users.

Alberto Acerbi is a cognitive/evolutionary anthropologist with a particular interest in computational science. He has been awarded a British Academy and Royal Society’s Newton Fellowship and he joined, in January 2013, the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol.

Gian Marco Campagnolo is Lecturer in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at Edinburgh University. He works in the area of the sociology of business knowledge. His research empirically focuses on ICT market intermediaries using a combination of qualitative and digital research methods. His research is exemplified by studies of salespeople, global IT vendors, analysts & consultants.

Sampsa is Associate professor in co-design at the Aalto School of, Art, Design and Architecture and a Senior Researcher at the Aalto University School of Economics, Helsinki Finland. Sampsa’s research and teaching focus on user involvement in innovation and the co-evolution of technologies, practices and organisations. He also edits the journal Science and Technology Studies.  Sampsa.hyysalo@aalto.fi

Sampsa will give two talks this week.

 Wednesday 1st Oct ISSTI Occasional Public Lecture,

The user dominated technology era: dynamics of dispersed peer-innofusion in Arctic vehicles 

3.30 – 5.30 pm Wednesday 1st October,

Room 183, The University of Edinburgh,  Old College (on the ground floor, on the right side as you enter the the quad)

Abstract

Users invent new products and product categories, but the assumption has been that manufacturers will supplant users if their innovation is of value to many. The current paper examines Russian all terrain vehicles “karakats” to discuss a case of an era of extended user dominated technology and the related dynamics of dispersed peer-innovation. Karakat users have invented, modified, diversified and iterated this technology, as well as continued to self-build and self-maintain it. These vehicles are wide spread, have half a century of history and hundreds of design variants. Manufacturers serve only a small subsection of the market, albeit they have established new markets based on karakat principles. To make sense of the phenomenon, we combine concepts from user innovation research and science & technology studies. We find that the combinatory effect of previously known dynamics related on users in innovation offers a plausible explanation for the user dominance and dispersed peer innofusion pattern, which we elaborate.

Friday 3rd October 9:30-11:00,  Social Informatics Cluster 

Collaborative futuring with and by makers

Sampsa Hyysalo, Cindy Kohtala, Pia Helminen & Samuli Mäkinen

Informatics Forum 

Maker spaces and maker activities are rapidly proliferating and evolving phenomena at the interface of lay and professional design offering access to low-cost digital fabrication equipment. They also come in many varieties and change fast, presenting a difficult target for, for instance, public authorities, who would like to cater for them but operate in much slower planning cycles. As part of participatory planning of Helsinki Central Library, we experimented with a form of collaborative futuring with and by makers. By drawing elements from both lead-user workshops and participatory design we conducted a futuring workshop, which allowed engaging the local maker communities in identifying the issues relevant for public maker space for 2020. It further engaged the participants into envisioning a smaller prototype maker space and invited them into realizing its activities. The workshop results and post evaluation indicate that particularly the gained solution information was of high relevance to library planners, as was the possibility to trial and elaborate activities on a rolling basis in the prototype space. The more general trends in making for 2020 were useful too, but to a lesser extent, and it is likely that just these could have been gained with more traditional futuring means.

Keywords: makers, futuring, lead users, lead-user workshop, participatory design, hands-on future, full scale modeling, extended co-design.

The Social Informatics Cluster  website has videos and details of previous talks

Where: Informatics Forum every Friday morning, coffee available 1.16 between 9.30 and 11.00am.

Friday 19th September – Efrem Mallach 

Jointly with the Business School and with thanks to Neil Pollock

“Forty Years in Analyst Relations: A Personal Retrospective”?

Dr. Efrem Mallach, one of the founders of Industry Analyst Relations, is Research Director at Kea Company. Efrem is one of the top experts in the world on Analyst Relations. Efrem’s role combines consulting to Kea Company clients with developing research methodologies, measurement tools and best practices.

Efrem has been involved in Analyst Relations since the late 1970s, when he represented Honeywell Information Systems’ minicomputer division to the then-nascent industry analyst community. As a consultant and an industry analyst in the mid-1980s, he saw that vendors with whom he worked, often did not know how to work with people like himself – to their detriment, since consultants and analysts influenced a large fraction of their sales. He therefore began to consult with those vendors to improve the effectiveness of their analyst/consultant relations programs.

In 1987 he wrote the first edition of “WIN THEM OVER: A Survival Guide for Corporate Analyst/Consultant Relations Programs”, devoted entirely to helping information technology firms optimise their relationships with consultants and analysts. In 1992 Efrem co-founded Kensington Group, an Analyst Relations consultancy of which he was CEO until his return to academia in 2002. Efrem is based in New England, a region where many of the  major analyst houses are headquartered and teaches business courses at a nearby university.

Watch an interview with Efrem here

Friday 26th September – Jee Hyun Suh

Jee is currently completing her PhD  at the University of Edinburgh on The co-evolution of an emerging mobile technology and mobile services: A study of the distributed governance of technological innovation through the case of WiBro in South Korea.

Friday 3rd October – Sampsa Hyysalo, Professor, INUSE User and Innovation research group, Aalto University School of Art and Design

Watch a video of his TED  talk here

Friday 10th October – Alberto Acerbi 

Friday 17th October – Farjam Eshraghian 

Friday 24th October – Kalle Lyytinen , Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences in the University of Jyväskylä

In conjunction with the Institute for the study of science and technology (ISSTI).

Making and breaking rules in information technology (IT) rich environments: The role of meaning and time in organisational regulation

The materialization of rules in Information Technology (IT) and their impact on practice have been rarely explored. A review of literature not only shows that IT is poorly conceptualized in studies of organizational regulation; especially, the social meaning of materialized rules and the time period of their impact has been ignored. The current pervasive use IT to regulate organizational behaviors warrants an exploratory study to theorize about the ternary relationships between rules, IT, and practices. To this end we trace IT uses that embed regulatory episodes (where behaviors are regulated by rules) during the implementation and assimilation of an e-learning system at a French university.  The study helps us disentangle how rules become materialized in IT rich environments and how their interpretation unfolds in practice. Through regulatory episodes, we identify five meaningful modalities of organizational regulation in IT rich environments. Our analysis helps also formulate four conjectures about the dynamics of IT based organizational regulation. The implications of our findings are relevant for the theories of organizational regulation and the management of compliance.

Kalle Lyytinen (PhD, Computer Science, University of Jyvaskyla; Dr. h.c. from Umeå University) is Iris S. Wolstein professor at Case Western Reserve University, a CIIR professor at University of Umeå, Sweden and a visiting professor at London School of Economics, U.K..  He is currently Associate Dean of Research and the Academic Director of the Doctor of Management Programs at Weatherhead School of Management. Between 1992 and 2012 he was the 3rd most productive scholar in the IS field when measured by the AIS basket of 8 journals; he is currently among the 5 most cited scholars in the IS field based on his adjusted h-index (67). He is LEO Award recipient (2013), AIS fellow (2004), and the former chairperson of IFIP WG 8.2. He has published around 300 refereed articles and edited or written nearly 20 books or special issues on the nature of IS discipline, system design, method engineering, computer supported cooperative work, standardization, ubiquitous computing, social networks. He recently edited a special issue to Organization Science on digital innovation and has recently finished a special issue to MISQ on social communications and symbolic aspects of information systems and a special issue to ISR on the Information Technology and Future of Work. He is currently editing a special to MISQ on digitally enabled innovation. He is involved in research that explores IT induced radical innovation in software development, digitalization of complex design processes, requirements discovery and modeling for large scale systems, and digital infrastructures especially for mobile services.

Friday 7th November – Ali Eshrahi 

An interdisciplinary symposium

3rd – 4th September 2014, Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, University of Edinburgh

Hosted by: Design Informatics, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Organisers: Chris Speed, Gian Marco Campagnolo, Siobhan Magee and New Media Scotland

Keynotes: Sian Lindley (Microsoft Research), Sophie Woodward (University of Manchester), Hermann Zschiegner (TWO-N)

Confirmed speakers and artists: Bea Alex, Chris Barker, Mina Braun, Jamie Cross, Ewan Klein, Craig Martin, Hadi Mehrpouya, Mitch Miller, Wendy Moncur, Larissa Pschetz, Mark Selby, Duncan Shingleton, Alice Street, Arno Verhoeven.

The term ‘data’ is ubiquitous across our homes and workplaces, academic and mainstream media, political discourses and ethical disputes. Sometimes its presence can take the form of representations of various facets of our lives, such as statistics or visualisations of figures. Data is a part of the contracts that we make with each other, companies that we deal with, and the fallout of the devices that we use. Our positions within these relationships change our competences based upon whether we are a professional producer of data or an amateur. In other instances, ‘data’ appears not as information in its own right, but as a lens through which to discuss, and often critique, governments and corporations. The reverberations of Big Data controversies for example, suggest that data is developing to be one of the key political issues of our time: a point of convergence for politics and economics, technology, and statecraft.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this ubiquity, the meaning of data is blurred. However, rather than calling for the creation of a rigid definition of data, this context suggests the need for comparison and discussion.

The majority of the symposium will be made up of keynote presentations and shorter presentations from invited speakers. On the second day, attendees will participate in a workshop and later a discussion session about ideas that have emerged over the course of the event. The symposium will include opportunities for attendees to discuss their own work with speakers. An exhibition of visual/ sensory works that question what data is and how it is produced will run in tandem with the talks and presentations.

The symposium will be held at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation.
3rd September: 1pm – 6pm.
4th September 9am – 4pm.

All attendees are invited to Jelly and Gin’s ‘data dinner’ at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation at 8pm on 3rd September. www.jellyandgin.com

This event is free but ticketed. To register, please visit http://producingdata.eventbrite.com

Informal Seminar
Dr Giuditta de Prato, JRC-IPTS, European Commission

Friday 11 July 10:00-11:30
Seminar Room, Old Surgeons Hall,
High School Yards

Dr Giuditta de Prato, of the European Commission DG Joint Research Centre (JRC), Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) will present an informal seminar on the IPTS work to identify and analyse leading technology innovation centres to support EC industry policy.

This was conducted as part of the European ICT Poles of Excellence (EIPE) project for DG CNECT.

She will present the results of the study, and discuss the methodology for creating indicators using multiple data sets. This will be followed by thoughts on how this policy research of this type can be carried forward using ‘big data’ techniques.

Dr Giuditta De Prato

Giuditta De Prato is a permanent staff member at the JRC IPTS working on projects on the economic aspects of the Information Society and on the impacts of Information Society Technologies, mainly focusing on ICT R&D, the software sector, patents and innovation, including projects such as PREDICT . She uses social network analysis, data mining and qualitative methods, bring together national statistics, company data, and technology-based indicators.

She has a PhD in Economics and Institutions from the University of Bologna (Italy). Before joining IPTS, she was a software developer and IT consultant from 1992 to 2005. Before joint the European Commission, in 2009 she was a research assistant, focussing on research activities on local development, evaluation, ICT and open source at the University of Bologna, where she also lectured on macroeconomics and environmental economics.

Recent publications cover topics such as the internationalisation of ICT R&D, with a focus on Asia and Europe, the structure of the video games industry, and she recently co-edited a book, Digital Media Worlds, The New Economy of Media (Palgrave, 2014)