Papers by Devina Ramduny-Ellis
The core of the program of study in the new English National Curriculum in Computing for secondar... more The core of the program of study in the new English National Curriculum in Computing for secondary education is on computational thinking. This requires pupils to analyse problems in computational terms, write computer programs to solve them and in so doing develop their own capacity to learn how to learn. Although the importance of teaching computational thinking skills from a young age is acknowledged, deciding which specific skills should be taught is still unclear. The ability to think abstractly and use symbols related to abstract concepts is an integral part of computational thinking and according to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, is not usually triggered until the teen years to adulthood. So is there a benefit of teaching computational thinking from an early age? This paper explores some of the challenges in this area based on a literature review and presents some early findings from an empirical study in teaching computational thinking to 12-13 years old pupils.
Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2007
People and Computers XXI fully reflects the changing terrain of contemporary HCI, with researcher... more People and Computers XXI fully reflects the changing terrain of contemporary HCI, with researchers examining contexts as diverse as the social world of Blogs, the creative world of Digital Live Art, and the virtual world of Second Life®.
People and Computers XVI - Memorable Yet Invisible, 2002
Feedthrough and awareness of user activities are major issues in CSCW. A key difference between a... more Feedthrough and awareness of user activities are major issues in CSCW. A key difference between awareness and goal-directed feedthrough lies in the required pace and quality of feedthrough. Getting the right pace of feedthrough is important for usability and to avoid overloading networks. Notification mechanisms should therefore allow dynamic tuning of the pace and volume of update events. This matching of the required and supplied pace of update events we call impedance matching. A separable notification server is often ideally placed to perform impedance matching between enduser clients. These design principles have been applied in an experimental notification server Getting-to-Know.
Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '98, 1998
Personal Technologies, 2000
Architectural design has an important effect on usability, most notably on temporal properties. T... more Architectural design has an important effect on usability, most notably on temporal properties. This paper investigates software architecture options for mobile user-interfaces, in particular those for collaborative systems. One of the new features of mobile systems as compared with fixed networks is the connection point to the physical network, the point of presence (PoP), which forms an additional location for code and data. This allows architectures that bring computation closer to the users hence reducing feedback and feedthrough delays. A consequence of using PoPs is that code and data have to be mobile within the network leading to potential security problems.
Occurrence of one hundred and twenty four taxa of indigenous trees is ABSTRACT reported f r o m t... more Occurrence of one hundred and twenty four taxa of indigenous trees is ABSTRACT reported f r o m the S o u t h e r n Circle of the forests of Kerala w i t h n o t e s on their distribution within the area. W i t h the shrinkage in forest cover, many trees are becoming rare and getting confined to isolated patches. Developmental activities i i k e construction of dams and the subsequent alterations in the reservoir catchnents are threatening their surviai. It is suggested that urgent steps are to be t a k e n t o grow them. (MYRISTICACEAE) Frequent, i n evergreens and waterlogged areas. Lagerstroemia microcarpa Wt .
This paper reports on some of the work produced on the DIRC Targeted Activity 'Dependable Deploym... more This paper reports on some of the work produced on the DIRC Targeted Activity 'Dependable Deployment'. It particularly focuses on the issue of risks that arise during the development and deployment stages of systems design. Risks inevitably plague complex systems design projects and since few projects can be stopped and begun again professionals often try to avoid them or solve their emergent problems through sharing knowledge gained from personal experiences-'war stories'-with other practitioners. We report on our development of a web site to list war stories-descriptions of risks and subsequent actions-arising from specific healthcare information systems development projects. This is intended as a resource to enable developers in this domain to learn from the problems and experiences of other projects.
Computers in Entertainment, 2007
Page 1. 1 Places to stay on the move Software architectures for mobile user interfaces Alan DixDe... more Page 1. 1 Places to stay on the move Software architectures for mobile user interfaces Alan DixDevina Ramduny, Tom Rodden, Nigel Davies. aQtive limited Birmingham Research Park Vincent Drive Birmingham, B15 2SQ, UK and Lancaster University [email protected] ...
The design process used in the development of many products we use daily and the nature of the pr... more The design process used in the development of many products we use daily and the nature of the products themselves are becoming increasingly digital. Although our whole world is turning ever more digital, our bodies and minds are naturally conceived to interact with the physical. Very often, in the design of user-targeted information appliances, the physical and digital processes are formulated separately and usually, due to cost factors, they are only brought together for user testing at the end of the development process. This not only makes major design changes more difficult but it can also significantly affect the users' level of acceptance of the product and their experience of use. It is therefore imperative that designers explore the relationship between the physical and the digital form early on in the development process, when one can rapidly work through different sets of ideas. The key to gaining crucial design information from products lies in the construction of meaningful prototypes. This paper specifically examines how physical materials are used during the early design stage and seeks to explore whether the inherent physical properties of these artefacts and the way that designers interpret and manipulate them have a significant impact on the design process. We present the findings of a case study based on information gathered during a design exercise. Detailed analysis of the recordings reveals far more subtle patterns of behaviour than expected. These include the ways in which groups move between abstract and concrete discussions, the way groups comply with or resist the materials they are given, and the complex interactions between the physicality of materials and the group dynamics. This understanding is contributing to ongoing research in the context of our wider agenda of explicating the fundamental role of physicality in the design of hybrid physical and digital artefacts.
The Tracker project is studying rework in systems engineering projects. Our hypothesis is that pr... more The Tracker project is studying rework in systems engineering projects. Our hypothesis is that providing decision makers with information about previous relevant decisions will assist in reducing the amount of rework in a project. We propose an architecture for the flexible integration of the tools implementing the variety of theories and models used in the project. The techniques include ethnographic analysis, natural language processing, activity theory, norm analysis, and speech and handwriting recognition. In this paper, we focus on the natural language processing components, and describe experiments which demonstrate the feasibility of our text mining approach.
Offices are full of paper: on desks, in filing cabinets, in drawers, in briefcases, perhaps even ... more Offices are full of paper: on desks, in filing cabinets, in drawers, in briefcases, perhaps even in piles on the floor. Many studies have shown that paper and other physical artefacts are essential for effective work. We show why these artefacts are important and how they form a key part of organisational memory. Using the metaphor of the organisation as a computer we see that artefacts function both as triggers to initiate action and also as placeholders within business processes. Understanding the multiple roles of artefacts is essential to avoid problems when redesigning the physical or electronic representation of documents.
International Journal of Arts and Technology, 2008
He has designed or product managed around 50 products to market and has published 20 academic jou... more He has designed or product managed around 50 products to market and has published 20 academic journal and conference papers. Steve has a range of research interests related to product design and development including the rapid design development of information appliances, the role of physicality in the design process and the role of Cradle to Cradle theories in product design & development. He works closely with academic partners, particularly Lancaster University and those in blue chip industry such as Sony-Ericsson and Samsung. He is currently engaged in a major project with partners at Lancaster University investigating the nature of physical interaction and its effects on design with the help of an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant.
Conference companion on Human …, 1996
In long-term interaction (over minutes, hours, or days) the tight cycle of action and feedback is... more In long-term interaction (over minutes, hours, or days) the tight cycle of action and feedback is broken. People have to remember that they have to do things, that other people should do things and why things happen when they do. This paper describes some results of a study into ...
RR9509, University of Huddersfield, 1995
This is a broad theoretical investigation into how events trigger action. In the course of studyi... more This is a broad theoretical investigation into how events trigger action. In the course of studying cooperative workflow activity in a structured fashion it has emerged that a significant proportion of such activity involves long-term interactions. Human cognitive abilities are such that we usually cannot retain mental lists of all the tasks we are (meant to be) engaged in. As a result of this, the flow of work activities can be adversely affected. The potential problems that can ensue are:-recalling out-of-context events-reacting to long-term deadlines-resuming activity (post-interruption)-remembering the non-occurrence of anticipated events In the application of a systematic analysis of workflow activities we have gained some insight into predicting which of the above problems are likely to occur and how we might offset any disruptions to the flow of cooperative work. Unlike most workflow studies-in the strict sense of the term-the work reported here is concerned far more with interorganisational interactions and processes. This in turn produces another problem: that of maintaining a flow of interaction when there may be no central control over the whole activity.
The core of the program of study in the new English National Curriculum in Computing for secondar... more The core of the program of study in the new English National Curriculum in Computing for secondary education is on computational thinking. This requires pupils to analyse problems in computational terms, write computer programs to solve them and in so doing develop their own capacity to learn how to learn. Although the importance of teaching computational thinking skills from a young age is acknowledged, deciding which specific skills should be taught is still unclear. The ability to think abstractly and use symbols related to abstract concepts is an integral part of computational thinking and according to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, is not usually triggered until the teen years to adulthood. So is there a benefit of teaching computational thinking from an early age? This paper explores some of the challenges in this area based on a literature review and presents some early findings from an empirical study in teaching computational thinking to 12-13 years old pupils.
Published at the Design Research Society Conference 2008, Jul 2008
The design process used in the development of many products we use daily and the nature of the pr... more The design process used in the development of many products we use daily and the nature of the products themselves are becoming increasingly digital. Although our whole world is turning ever more digital, our bodies and minds are naturally conceived to interact with the physical. Very often, in the design of user-targeted information appliances, the physical and digital processes are formulated separately and usually, due to cost factors, they are only brought together for user testing at the end of the development process. This not only makes major design changes more difficult but it can also significantly affect the users’ level of acceptance of the product and their experience of use. It is therefore imperative that designers explore the relationship between the physical and the digital form early on in the development process, when one can rapidly work through different sets of ideas. The key to gaining crucial design information from products lies in the construction of meaningful prototypes. This paper specifically examines how physical materials are used during the early design stage and seeks to explore whether the inherent physical properties of these artefacts and the way that designers interpret and manipulate them have a significant impact on the design process. We present the findings of a case study based on information gathered during a design exercise. Detailed analysis of the recordings reveals far more subtle patterns of behaviour than expected. These include the ways in which groups move between abstract and concrete discussions, the way groups comply with or resist the materials they are given, and the complex interactions between the physicality of materials and the group dynamics. This understanding is contributing to ongoing research in the context of our wider agenda of explicating the fundamental role of physicality in the design of hybrid physical and digital artefacts.
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Papers by Devina Ramduny-Ellis