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Tech Report kmi-96-07 Abstract


Evolution, Not Revolution: PD in the Toolbelt Era
Techreport ID: kmi-96-07
Date: 1996
Author(s): Tamara Sumner and Markus Stolze

An emerging software development context the toolbelt context offers new challenges and opportunities to participatory design. A case study illustrates how professionals working in product design domains assemble and evolve collections, or "toolbelts," of off-the-shelf software tools to support their ongoing work practices. An analysis shows that while the toolbelt context is a politically empowering software development context, domain professionals still need help: (1) identifying suitable tools and "gluing" them together to create a coherent system, (2) designing information representations, and (3) evolving better long-term work practices. A new model of participatory design is proposed - participatory evolutionary development - as a potential technique for addressing these challenges.

Publication(s):

To appear in: Computers in Context, Edited by Morten Kyng and Lars Mathiassen, MIT Press
 
KMi Publications
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities