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Viktoria People - Lina Larsson
HemsamarITen - Mobile support for homecare The HemsamarIT project aim is to develop mobile IT support for the Swedish Homecare. The homecare personnel are mobile in their work as they move between the homes of the elderly and perform their work there. Cooperation and coordination are requirements of a high-quality care. Information management is crucial in cooperation and coordination. The quality of the care can increase through the use of mobile technology. The project will use participant observation to develop an understanding of the everyday work of the homecare employees.
Viktoria People - Victoria Nilsson
Where disabled people are concerned it is not possible (or easy) to keep dichotomy between the needs in the working and "leisure" environment. Most disabilities are permanent, although sometimes shifting in complexity over time. In the modern society, information technology will have an effect on people's lives in an increasingly higher degree. Since the world is becoming increasingly connected, with everybody available all the time, anywhere, the group of disabled risk getting excluded from the modern society. However, by simple means, this can be avoided, and in the same instance that the disabled community are joining the future, in many cases the "able" community is helped in ways it did not anticipate. The results from the project can be used to improve current and future technology, since the disability perspective accentuates difficulties that exist, but that the everyday user is presently compensating for. The methods used to identify present and future situations for the interest group, are Future Workshops with referential groups, combined with interviews, as well as ethnographical studies, that identifies the everyday situations of the interest group. Interviews with interest groups and referential groups from the disabled community will be conducted to learn from their ideas for the future. The people in the interest group are important since they are the only people with firsthand experience of their situation. The interviews are a part of Future Workshops, where the groups start by identifying the present situation, then go on to thinking about future situations, and finalizes in a statement or prototype, that is the result of user oriented opinions.
Viktoria People - Kalevi Pessi
mCommerce - Mobile Electronic Commerce The purpose of the mCommerce project is to contribute to the emerging field of Information Technology research in mobile e-commerce. Developments in mobile technology open up new ways of doing business in mobile settings. The objective of the project is to explore new applications for e-commerce in mobile settings. The industrial objective is to create interesting and potentially exploitable applications.
Viktoria People - Oskar Juhlin, Daniel Normark, Alexandra Weilenmann, Mattias Esbjörnsson and Senja Edwardsson
Industrial Partner - Hogia, Ericsson Microwave Systems, Västtrafik, Vägverket and Promillennium
The RoadTalk project consists of a number of smaller projects:
Bus Driver Talk: Current Practices and Future Options - Communication between bus drivers and its influence on the coordination of public transport is analyzed. Fieldwork is conducted among bus drivers working in the public transport system. The knowledge of the bus driver activities is used to develop prototypes of Bus Driver Informatics, which will be further analyzed in ordinary work settings.
Guarding the Roads: Current Practices and Socio-technical Relations - The purpose of this project is to study the Road Guards in their work to maintain the Swedish roads i.e to clean them and fix problems. The project will result in an understanding of the competencies among the civil servants on local road and traffic condition, and how they use current information technology, and a design of a prototype to broaden the distribution of road guards knowledge.
Talk Snow: Evaluation of a New Coordination System for Snow Clearance at Arlanda Airport - Efficient snow clearance is essential for maintaining high availability and capacity of the Arlanda airport during the winter season. Extensive efforts are therefore continuously made to improve the snow clearing operations. The purpose of the Snow Talk project is to evaluate the technologies supporting coordination of snow clearance, and to design concrete prototypes.
BikeTalk: Ordering the Use of Motorcycles - Bikers are a special form of road users since they often travel as a group of vehicles. They also journey to meet other bikers at specific meetings. This group of users would benefit of new information technology to support the articulation of their driving. The project is based on ethnographic user studies and design sessions with industrial partners.
Viktoria People - Henrik Fagrell, Kerstin Forsberg and Johan Sanneblad
The news industry has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. New news mediums have emerged from the conventional ones have moved from the kitchen tables and living room corners to our desktops and mobile devices. Inside the newsrooms, the use of new technologies to exploit these news channels have increased dramatically. Other matters have not changed in the same dramatic way: journalists are still confronted with by deadlines and conventional media formats. The organizing of work, and the sharing of resources, ideas, and knowledge have not been issues for IT-support. Instead the focus has been on building IT for standardized production processes. This approach is common in factories to optimize the production, but key question to ask is: "will it work in the newsrooms?" As the news products are constantly redefined through, for example personalization, media-independent authoring and medium convergence, the industrial production methods may be unsuited.
There are many new technical possibilities to provide people with news that are under-utilised. Thus, it is important for us to take a leading role in this development by exploring the possibilities with the techniques. Our approach, however, departs from what is possible in the editorial work. For example, a radio journalist could publish on the Web, in electronic newsletters, or even for mobile phones with a minimal transaction cost. By investigating editorial work as a point of departure for design of IT in news production and new news consumption we hope to make a substantial contribution in this very dynamic and compelling market.
The MobiNews project started in September of 1998 with an introductory study at Svenska Dagbladet (see, Forsberg and Ljungberg 1998). Later on in 1998 an extensive ethnographical field study was done at Sveriges Radio, Gšteborg. We observed the editorial work before, during, and after the Swedish election. This resulted in a work practice analysis report with design implications (Fagrell et al. 1999; Fagrell and Ljungberg 2000) . Informed by the fieldwork an initial prototype system - the NewsPilot - has been constructed (Dahlberg et al. 1999a, 1999b) and a generalised design concept - the NewsSpace - has been developed (Forsberg 1999). A more ambitious prototype was developed and evaluated in use at Sveriges Radio, Gšteborg (Fagrell 2000). The results were promising and the industrial partner stared a company to commersialise the NewsMate in a company named ICtech with the product name FieldWise. The research projects will continue to explore the structure of active remembering that is suitable for computerization. The objective is to design knowledge management concepts for mobile people in knowledge intensive firms, which will be illustrated in prototype systems.
Viktoria People - Per Dahlberg, Johan Sanneblad and Fredrik Ljungberg
Industrial Partner - Cell Network and Newmad
The importance of informal face-to-face communication "to get the work done" in organizations has been reported frequently in the literature. Our focus is on those informal interactions concerned with work, and in particular how we may support these with IT. ProxyLady attempts to facilitate this set of informal meetings by notifying people candidates for interaction and providing information needed in the subsequent meeting. The system lets the user mark items that she wants to address face-to-face with particular persons. When these people are close, it notifies and provides easy access to the item.
Viktoria People - Fredrik Ljungberg, Ulf Nilrud, Andreas Nilsson, Daniel Olsson and Karl-Petter Åkesson
Industrial Partner - Ericsson Ebilits, Ericsson Mobile Data Design, Guide Datakonsult AB and SICS Teracom
This projects foundation is the following statements about people and their use of IT * People are spending 72 minutes per day travelling to their work and back home * Mobile technology has reach a state of sophistication that would enable a vast number of applications and services to be implemented, that can be beneficial for the commuter. The Pendulum project will explore, design and evaluate location dependent IT services for car commuters. The technology we will use is DAB-GSM (developed by Ericsson Mobile Data Design). We will use DAB, i.e., digital radio technology, for user input, and GSM, i.e., mobile telephony technology, for user output. The object of the project is to produce commercially interesting patents and services that are interesting enough to be presented at international research conferences and in journals. The project will first conduct an inductive study of car commuting, on which different design options could be based. The most interesting design option will be implemented and evaluated. Currently we are implementing two different IT-services for mobile, wireless use in a car-setting. First out is ShoutCar, (shortpaper/poster submited to CHI2000, see 'publications' at bottom) creating the virtual music booth in the car! Secondly there is AudIT making it possible for the car driver to record, listen and submit audio notes to recipients. All this via an interface that does not interfere with driving safely and with the option to syncronize these notes via Outlook.
Viktoria People - Ulf Nilrud and Erica Wollerfjord
TR 4005, COMETA Project is supported by the European Commission DG XIII in the scope of the Fourth Framework Program, Transport Application Program. April 1998 - February 2000. The COMETA project is initiated to answer the strong concern regarding the potentially growing proliferation of On Board Systems for commercial vehicles. The objective of COMETA is to define and design modular associations of various on board performed functions, allowing for efficient interfacing within a global transport telematic system. This will result in an on board integrated information systems architecture. The On Board Systems architecture will be, modular, flexible and, based on a mid and long term broad vision, evolutional. The On Board Systems must be efficient, user friendly, cheap to use and to a large extend inter-operable. The project will, amongst others, consider technologies such as: On board data capture, data processing, information management and exchanges within vehicle and/or the external world, technical diagnosis, mobile EDI, electronic tachograph, driving helps, road pricing devices... In this project, truck manufacturers, solution providers, consultants, fleet operators are represented and it is supported by professional organizations and public authorities. A first architecture draft will be used to simulate its implementation with different fleet operators already equipped with partial dedicated devices. Based on these simulations and close co-operation with KAREN and INTACT projects, the so validated architecture will be finalized. The output, added to the system architecture, will come as handbooks for systems architecture designers and users, fleet operators, truck manufacturers and solution providers
Viktoria People - Jens Bergqvist, Fredrik Ljungberg and Per Dahlberg
Industrial Partners - Linq Systems AB and Göteborgs Stad
The society is changing. People become more and more mobile, travelling the world or just moving about in the office. Not very long ago, it was considered inefficient when a person at an office had to talk to a colleague. The role of the manager was to monitor and control staff. Now co-operation, collaboration, teams, knowledge work and talk-society are buzzwords and the work at the office tend to be focused on project orientation and mobility. This project aim to investigate and design IT-artefacts for knowledge work in project form in mobile settings. This implies that there is a strong emphasis on co-operation and communication between the participants in the project. Our previously conducted field study shows that participants are constantly moving about in the office, holding meetings, talking on the phone and talking to people. Not much time is spent at the desk, even though most of the IT-artefacts are designed for the desktop. The project will explore the concepts of mobility, as well as investigating how co-operation in mobile settings can be supported by new IT-artefacts.
Viktoria People - Fredrik Ljungberg and Steinar Kristoffersen
The MobiCom project started in 1994 as part of the Cooperation Technology project (Coop). It continued within the Internet project. MobiCom is a research project aimed at realising information technology support for dispersed groups of networking, mobile knowledge workers. MobiCom addresses two fundamental problems of this emerging organisational form: work co-ordination and collective sharing of experiences. The MobiCom project is based on studies of work and IT-use in a pharmaceutical research company. It comprises ethnographic investigations, design and evaluation.
Viktoria People - Henrik Fagrell, Magnus Bergquist and Peter Ljungstrand
Industrial Partner - Göteborg Energi
Our focus is to design IT-support for mobile electricians at Göteborg Energi. The design is empirically informed. To provide a rich picture of what constitutes mobile work in service-oriented manual settings. We believe there is a substantial potential for IT-support in this type of work, and there has not been much research in this area. An ethnographical field study has taken place at Göteborg Energi. This research has focused on the work practice as it is today. We have also followed a pilot experiment, where a geographical information system was made accessible from the car. Informed b y the empirical findings, a prototype system has been developed, which will support the informal communication and co-ordination between teams of electricians. In addition, to the ethnographic study, we have used techniques from participatory design, e.g., deign briefings and future workshops.
Viktoria People - Jens Bergqvist and Senja Edwardsson
The ComCenter project (previously known as the MoWAC project) is the continuation of the MobiLinq project. The current computing paradigm for mobile IT relies on ideas adopted from the desktop computer (the desktop metaphor, etc.). However, the desktop computer and its applications were designed for office automation, while the mobile computer and its services should enhance the activities of the "nomadic networkers." These people are not primarily engaged with "office automation," but interaction with others. What is the "Office 2000" (yes, it's a metaphor) for mobile IT? ComCenter aims to explore and design new applications and paradigms for the nomads of the future.
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