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