Human-centred design

In this paper, I will be discussing the consequence of critical realism for the development of sociology in general, since sociology is widely an applied science.
I will be arguing that sociology, as a study of the character of society/ies, social agents and their actions = natural kinds, is a complete science, which can stand on its own. I’ll therefore try to show sociology is a social theory, which has two complementary scientific models of inquiry namely (a). Explanatory Sociology theory. (b). Empirical sociology. (economics) which on every scientific level follows that pattern a then b, since realities of nature should be

In this paper, I will be discussing the consequence of critical realism for the development of sociology in general, since sociology is widely an applied science.
I will be arguing that sociology, as a study of the character of society/ies, social agents and their actions = natural kinds, is a complete science, which can stand on its own. I’ll therefore try to show sociology is a social theory, which has two complementary scientific models of inquiry namely (a). Explanatory Sociology theory. (b). Empirical sociology. (economics) which on every scientific level follows that pattern a then b, since realities of nature should be scrutinised if sociology science is to be possible.

This paper aims to explore the integration of Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) methodology with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance innovative processes. It seeks to assess how LLMs can support analytical and creative processes in design teams and how hybrid human-LLM collaboration can contribute to more dynamic and unconventional problem-solving approaches.
Design/methodology/approach: The study employs a theoretical analysis of SIT methodology and LLM capabilities, synthesizing existing literature on both topics. It proposes a framework for integrating SIT with LLMs, including structured prompt patterns for each stage of the SIT process. The approach includes a comparative analysis of human and LLM capabilities in inventive processes.
Findings: Research reveals that LLMs can significantly enhance the SIT process by providing rapid information synthesis, generating diverse ideas, and systematically applying SIT principles. However, human creativity, intuition, and holistic assessment remain crucial for breakthrough innovations. The study identifies specific prompt patterns and techniques for effective human-LLM collaboration within the SIT framework.
Research limitations/implications: As this is an initial theoretical framework, empirical validation through case studies or experimental research is needed to assess its practical effectiveness.
Practical implications: The proposed framework offers practitioners in the fields of innovation and design a structured approach to integrating AI into their creative processes. Provides specific guidelines for the use of LLM to enhance each stage of the SIT methodology, which could lead to more efficient and innovative outcomes.
Social implications: Integration of SIT with LLM could significantly influence public attitudes toward AI, potentially increasing its acceptance as a collaborative tool in creative and problemsolving processes. This approach may lead to more efficient and sustainable innovation practices in various industries, potentially addressing social challenges more effectively. However, it may also raise concerns about job displacement in creative fields, necessitating a focus on reskilling and education to prepare the workforce for collaboration with AI systems.
Originality/value: This paper presents a novel approach to integrating SIT methodology with state-of-the-art AI technology, offering new perspectives on increasing human creativity with machine capabilities in structured innovation processes. It contributes to the emerging field of AI-assisted design thinking and provides a foundation for further research in this area.

The advancement of artificial intelligence systems across industries introduces opportunities, critical risks, including lack of transparency, resource mismanagement, autonomy risks, and malicious exploitation. This paper presents novel process and techniques, Decentralized AI Governance Networks, which addresses these challenges through a robust, blockchain-based governance model with Tokenized Power Control mechanisms. DAGN ensures human-centric AI operation by dynamically monitoring compliance, enforcing ethical and operational rules and linking energy or computational resource access to realtime compliance metrics. Key components includes Power Access Tokens which regulates energy and resource usage, issued and revoked based on adherence to governance policies. Distributed Ledger for Governance, Immutable blockchain records that enhance transparency, accountability, and trust in AI operations. Sentinel Systems autonomous agents that monitor AI behavior, flag violations, and ensure non-compliant systems. Stakeholder Voting Mechanisms is Transparent, weighted voting for policy updates and violation resolution. Applications span critical infrastructure, healthcare, finance, cybersecurity, military domains, ensuring AI cannot harm humans.

Industry 4.0 and 5.0 paradigms have been crucial for companies in employing digital technologies as an ally for men to free them from dangerous and routine tasks in favour of higher value tasks, putting humans at the centre of the organization as the decision maker. However, on the one hand, the new industrial systems shift to new tasks requiring more 'cognitive' than 'physical' efforts; on the other hand, the approaches to assess the cognitive workload and ensure the physical well-being of the operators are far to be considered easily applicable. For this reason, this research reveals current research trajectories and explores the cognitive workload using subjective and objective indicators. The discussion highlights cognitive ergonomics and advocates for a harmonious balance between human and machine capabilities. It identifies factors contributing to cognitive overload in manufacturing and maps their interconnections. The analysis of recent research trends reveals a growing adoption of new approaches requiring the adoption of physiological measurements (e.g., electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalography (EEG), Electromyography (EMG), etc.). Finally, this investigation offers insights into future research directions, urging a nuanced exploration of industrial activities and addressing cognitive workload across organisational layers in the context of Industry 5.0.

Historically, part of Ars rootsliein Operations Research.It is the goal of thispaper to explore how AI has extended the problem solvingparadigm developedin OR. In particular, by examining how schedulingproblems are solvedusing OR and AI,we demonstrate thatAI extends OR's model of problem solvingthrough the opportunistic use ofknowledge, problem reformulation and learning. 1. Introduction Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come along way during the last 35 years. Like any "new" decision technology, the publicity that heralds its appearance tends to sweep aside technologies, such as Operations Research (OR), that have come before 1. Not surprisingly, the mere mention of the phrase Artificial Intelligence is liable to elicit from the Operations Research practitioner, a variety of responses from adulation to incredulity. In my experience, neither responses are appropriate, but are due primarily to a lack of knowledge of the field's basic methods. The g_al of this paper is to dispel many of the misconceptions that surround AI technology. By examining both approaches to problem solving, both the AI and OR practitioner should obtain a better appreciation of each other's approaches. The ultimate goal being to merge the approaches. Both OR and AI investigate problem solvingmethods. As Simon has noted,they share the same roots[19], but divergedat an earlypointin theirhistory.A common distinction between AI and OR has been that OR dealswith wellstructuredproblems and AI dealswith illstructured problems. I believe itistime to put thisdistinction torest. IA concern also raised by Sutherland [22]. 2for example, the issue of effective computability as described in Church's th_sis [3].

The  global  pandemic,  COVID-19  have  initiated  the  social distancing  and  digital  platforms  to  enhance  the  E-Learning  method.  People started  practicing  staying  indoors  and  being  idle  within  indoor  may  lead  to mental stress. To make people more involved and stress free, online learning is playing an important role. In this pandemic situation, online mode of learning is the best solution. Professors and other teaching professionals are making use of the  virtual  teaching  platforms  to  teach  from  their  home  with  all  effective  tools needed,  which  indeed  makes  the  online  sessions  effective  as  the  traditional ones.  Pandemic  has  changed  the  whole  process  of  teaching  and  learning.  This has made learners to stay at their place and connect virtually for a long period of time  and  which  in  turn  obstructs  teaching  and  learning  process.  This  Research framework emphasizes on the beneficial aspects of online learning at the time of pandemics.  The  continuous  learning  process  emphasized  through  online learning with some digital tools and techniques. Education is being transformed not  only  in  private  schools,  but  it  is  being  slowly  setting  benchmark  in government  schools  also.  E-learning  technology  is  now  creating  new  avenues and  transforming  the  education sector.  The  preparation  of  teachers  for  online classes has changed. As the rural area Schools and colleges are getting adapted to  the  technological  advancement  e-learning  is  getting  into  a  positive transformation.  It  is  a  great  motivating  factor  that  the  rural  area  is  trying  to adapt  to  the  digitally  enhanced  learning  method  from  the  traditional  methods. Even  though  having  many  benefits  in  E-Learning  there  are  some  obstacles  in online  learning,  but  still  digital  learning  has  employed.  The  one  factor  of consent is that the rural area students are not fully equipped with technological factors  like  uninterrupted  power  supply,  internet  and  mobile  devices.  Student behavior and attitude has changed in online classroom. Still many rural areas in India  are  trying  tofind  solution  for  the  above  challenges  to  become  eligible  to
education completely online or in digital format

With the emergence of digital technology, inefficiencies of the manual process in managing students' data can be reduced, bringing more possibilities to the teachers to strike a balance between their teaching approach, students' progress and the expected outcomes. Therefore, this paper presented a quantitative study aimed to analyse the readiness level among teachers in the Tasmik program towards the adoption of digital technology for managing student's data. Additionally, this paper also aimed to examine the correlation between the level of readiness to adopt digital technology among Islamic education teachers and the effectiveness of the proposed e-Tasmik digital tool. This study employed a quantitative research design using questionnaire-based survey. The respondents representing Islamic education teachers at four national primary schools in Pahang, Malaysia denote urban, suburban, and rural areas. Data is analysed using SPSS and Spearman Rho correlation test. Further analysis revealed that the respondents hold negative perception on the usefulness of the existing manual method and believe that they are ready to adopt digital technology for data recording, analysis and reporting. There is a weak correlation between the teachers' readiness level and e-Tasmik effectiveness which show that the readiness level among Islamic education teachers does not determine the effectiveness of e-Tasmik in terms of its Perceived Ease of Use (PEoU), Perceived Usefulness (PU) and User Acceptance (UA). This paper helps the stakeholders in Malaysia Islamic education to tailor teachers' needs with available digital technologies such that it will help to improve effective learning and teachers' productivity.

I develop Tetsurō Watsuji's relational model of the self as "betweenness". I argue that Watsuji's view receives support from two case studies: solitary confinement and dementia. Both clarify the constitutive interdependence between the self and the social and material contexts of "betweenness" that define its lifeworld. They do so by providing powerful examples of what happens when the support and regulative grounding of this lifeworld is restricted or taken away. I argue further that Watsuji's view helps see the other side of this deprivation, how reconstructing aspects of betweenness is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the self. I conclude by briefly indicating further consequences of this view.

Three graphic inethods of preseiitirig sclieduliiig iiifoniiatioii were coiiipared Ivitli each other aiid ivitli a coiiveiitiorial, iiuiiierical preseiitatioii. The graphic iiietliods were based ori tlie Gaiitt chart, arid all t h e e proved more effective tltaii tlie riiiiiierical preseritatiori in helping the subjects prodrice efficieiit scliedules. Oiie iiiethod iii particular ivliicli used a iiiacliiiies-by-time orgaiiizatioii aiid ideiitified iiiachiiies by color code proved superior to tlie others. This is explairied in teniis of the perceptual iiatrire of probleiii solrrtioii itsiiig these methods. It is stiggested that this orgaiiizatioii of iiifoniiatioii be adopted wlieii the priiiiary criterioit for scliedrile evaluatiori is iiiachiiie ritilizatioii aiid tliere are liiiiitatioiis on the display space aiid color-coditig available.

An approach to building up a distributed expert system for planning, scheduling and fault diagnosis, integrated with the conventional flexible manufacturing control system is proposed. The structure of the developed expert system shell is described. Some preliminary results for the operation of the expert system are given.

An important distinction is made in the planning domain between predictive planning problems and reactive execution problems [ 1]. The following paper discusses the distinction in the case of manufacturing scheduling. Given a set of jobs, an ordered set of production steps for each job, and a set of machines to perform these production steps, the predictive scheduling problems consists in determining an aJ)propriate allocation of production steps to machines over time. Given partial or complete information about the current state of the manufacturin?, system, the reactive execution (or dispatching) problem consists in deciding "in real-time' which production steps to execute next on each machine. The paper presents an architecture allowing to associate a predictive scheduler and a reactive dispatcher. The predictive scheduler constructs a predictive schedule and updates it occasionally in response to arising problems and opportunities (in this sense, the predictive scheduler is a bit reactive!). The reactive dispatcher decides in real-time which operations to start on the shop floor g1ven the actual course of events. It relies on the schedule to make its decisions, but overrides it in response to arising problems and opportunities. Our implementation allows the user to tune the oehavior of both the predictive scheduler and the reactive dispatcher, and therefore to compare various couplings of predictive and reactive scheduling procedures. Experimental results provide evidence that mdependent settings of predictive sclieduling and reactive execution algorithms can result in poor performance on the shop-floor.

A sailing yacht is a human-centred product, the design of which revolves primarily around the wants and desires of the future owner. In most cases, these preferences are not measurable, such as a personal aesthetic feeling, or a need for comfort, speed, safety etc. The aims of this paper are to demonstrate that these preferences can be classified and represented numerically, and to show that they are correlated with the type of yacht owned. As a case study, the owner's preferences for deck equipment are considered. These are determined by pairwise comparisons of the importance rankings for features previously defined by yacht owners, following the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. As a result, a quantitative representation of these preferences is established, and they are shown to be correlated with the type of yacht. The findings of the current study show that the yacht owners' preferences can be represented numerically, leading to a utilitarian conclusion that concerns the support and even some degree of automation of the design process.

The re-engineering of a manufacturing assembly line should allow an organisation to obtain significant performance improvement toward meeting company objectives. These performance improvements, often in the areas of quality, cost, and delivery (QCD) may be external in areas affecting customer satisfaction, and internal in areas such as improving average productivity obtained per staff member, or per unit of production area floor space. An Overall System Efficiency (OSE) decision support model is described for use in the analysis and prediction of customer satisfaction goals. The OSE model uses customer service level in terms of stockout frequency as a trade-off parameter when optimising overall performance achievable from the production line.

Empathy is a key driver for designers to unlock their user's perspective. However, its multi-dimensional nature can be detrimental to the design process; therefore, a structured approach is vital. The current emergence and capabilities of Virtual Reality (VR) technology have inspired this research to explore how designers can achieve the optimal level of empathy required to produce innovative design solutions. A qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with design engineers working with industry was performed to analyse current challenges in empathic design and identify how VR can address such challenges. The study highlighted that communication and resource factors were the main barriers to designer empathy. In response to this finding, this research bridges the gap between the designer and the user through the digital transformation of the designer's profession that provides enhanced value to human-centricity, social and ecological interactions. The outcome of this study entails the creation of a specification for a novel fully immersive virtual environment: The Digital Empathic Design Voyage that augments designers' empathic skills and empowers the designer to achieve cognitive and affective empathy towards their user from multiple perspectives. This research is a platform for a future empirical study addressing the impact of digital empathy on creating usercentred and innovative design solutions.

This paper considers the problem of grid scheduling in which different jobs are assigned to different processors, and a scheduling algorithm is devised, using tabu search, to find optimal solutions in order to maximize the number of scheduled jobs. However, inherent in the nature of the application, the processing times of jobs are not precise but are estimates that vary between minimal values, in case of premature failure of jobs, to maximal values as specified 'a priori' by wellexperienced users. Fuzzy methodology becomes instrumental in this application as it allows the use of fuzzy sets to represent the processing times of jobs, modelling their uncertainty. This work presents the implementation of a tabu search algorithm to create good schedules and explores the robustness of the schedule when processing times do vary by assessing its performance in both fuzzy and crisp modes. Finally, the impact of changing the shapes of fuzzy completion times and the average job length on the schedule performance is discussed.

In this paper we reflect critically on human-centred design (HCD) practice, in order to better understand differences between HCD principles and HCD practice. Based on a review of methods we articulate two tensions: 1) the tension of combining the contributions of researchers/designers versus those of end-users; and 2) the tension of combining the concerns for a current situation versus a future situation. We explore how these tensions were played out in practice via a case study of one HCD project. We suggest that ...

A seminal post-colonial scholar, Deborah Bird Rose (2004, 154) exclaims, 'the west collectively is the leader; it is closest to the future, and the rest of the world follows along behind'. Similarly, Design and Social Innovation is largely populated by case studies in Europe and the US, further reinforcing global hierarchies and certain paradigms. We speak to this politics and dominance from the periphery and share early insights from two international symposia on Design and Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific (DESIAP) to highlight the importance of exchanging ideas in various directions. We use Kasulis' (2002) heuristic of integrity to frame design that emphasizes rational, impersonal, discrete, externalised principles and models, in contrast to intimacy that starts from an interrelated view of designing that cannot be disentangled from the ecological, relational, intimate contexts in which it is performed. Using integrity and intimacy in our analysis, we heard practition...

Video captioning refers to the process of predicting a semantically consistent textual description from a given video clip. Even though a significant amount of research work is present for video captioning in English, for Bengali the field of video captioning is nearly unexplored. Therefore, this research aims at generating Bengali captions that plausibly describe the gist of a specific short video. To accomplish this, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based a sequence-to-sequence model is used that takes the video frame features as input and generates an analogous textual description. In this study, Microsoft Research Video Description Corpus (MSVD) dataset is used which is an English dataset. Therefore, a deep learning-based translator and manual labor are used to convert English captions into appropriate Bengali ones. Finally, the model's performance is evaluated using popular evaluation metrics-BLEU and TER. The proposed approach achieves BLEU and TER scores of 0.38 and 0.76 respectively, establishing a new benchmark for the Bengali video captioning tasks.

We present a new agent-based solution approach for the problem of scheduling multiple non-identical machines in the face of sequence dependent setups, job machine restrictions, batch size preferences, fixed costs of assigning jobs to machines and downstream considerations. We consider multiple objectives such as minimizing (weighted) earliness and tardiness, and minimizing job-machine assignment costs. We use an agent-based architecture called Asynchronous Team (A-Team), in which each agent encapsulates a different problem solving strategy and agents cooperate by exchanging results. Computational experiments on large instances of real-world scheduling problems show that the results obtained by this approach are significantly better than any single algorithm or the scheduler alone. This approach has been successfully implemented in an industrial scheduling system.

Production scheduling is an optimizing problem that can contribute strongly to the competitive capacity of companies producing goods and services. A way to promote the survival and the sustainability of the organizations in this upcoming era of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is the efficient use of the resources. A complete failure to stage tasks properly can easily lead to a waste of time and resources, which could result in a low level of productivity and high monetary losses. In view of the above, it is essential to analyse and continuously develop new models of production scheduling. This paper intends to present an I4.0 oriented decision support tool to the dynamic scheduling. After a fist solution has been generated, the developed prototype has the ability to create new solutions as tasks leave the system and new ones arrive, in order to minimize a certain measure of performance. Using a single machine environment, the proposed prototype was validated in an in-depth computational study through several instances of dynamic problems with stochastic characteristics. Moreover, a more robust analysis was done, which demonstrated that there is statistical evidence that the proposed prototype performance is better than single method of scheduling and proved the effectiveness of the prototype.

Although Universal Design is an internationally recognized way of thinking about the built environment, there is still a long way to go before user inclusion becomes a fundamental principle in all design. Education of future professionals is obviously one effective way to achieve this, but might be frustratingly slow if this is to take a new generation to become fully established. Identifying and finding ways of removing the barriers, attitudinal as well as physical, is then a priority area. The presentation introduces the authors’ collective teaching experiences on ways of sensitising and raising students’ awareness of the barriers and hazards that users face, through observation, simulation or experiential exercises. In order to recognize, in everyday environments, design solutions that are well-integrated and therefore less apparent, techniques to develop both a ‘Critical Eye’ and an ‘Appreciate Eye’ are discussed. Students are widely receptive to such challenges, but some reluct...

This paper describes the development ,and installation of the 5 Mill Scheduler, a dynamic scheduling application for a hot steel mill. The main objective of the scheduler is to dynamically generate ,and revise schedules, ,and make ffective use of the resources of the phant, while satisfying a complex set of constraints dealing with the dynamic behavior of the resources and the material processing specifications. The design of the system evolved from a knowledge-based approach, ,as suggested by the user, to a constraint-based reasoning approach embedding user supplied heuristics to prune the search space. The constraint-based approach proved to significantly outperform a pure knowledge-based approach. The goal of the scheduler was to operate on-line, closely linked to monitoring devices. The installation of the scheduler equired some refinements of the design to cope with imprecise data and with the need to provide greater flexibility to the operators in dealing with resource constra...

This paper is seeking to understand how Design Knowledge integration perspectives, context-sensitivity in the form of principled epistemic particularism, and the underlying objective and principles of design knowledge and design practice bring us towards a human-centred design approach.

Author Keywords: Design Knowledge; Principled Epistemic Particularism; Design Practice; Human-centred Design

One problem encountering at the job shop scheduling is minimum production size of machine is different from each another. This case increases lead time. A new approach was improved to reduce lead time. In this new approach, the parts, which materials are in stock and orders coming very frequently are assigned to machine to reduce lead time. Due the fact that there are a lot of machine and orders, it is possible to become so1ne probletns. In this paper, fuzzy logic is used to cope with this problem. New approach was simulated at the job sop that has owner 15 machinery and 50 orders. Simulation results showed that new approach reduced lead time between 27.89% and 32.36o/o.

In the present study, an integrated methodology of manufacturing planning has been formalised for a capacity constrained job-shop with consideration of capacity planning, loading, scheduling, and process plans flexibility for a given master production schedule. This study aims at generation of production schedules that are compatible with production plans developed at a higher level for feasible implementation at the shop floor. Performance of methodology is assessed for eight case studies from mean tardiness viewpoint. Results indicate that formalised integrated methodology is effective in the complex job-shop environment. Further, mean tardiness performance of integrated methodology is found better than that of the conventional hierarchical approach of manufacturing planning.

I Three Duals There are two competing loci for our interchange with the past, and two positions that we adopt vis-à-vis that past. These loci are history and memory, the one being the sum of what has happened up to now and the other comprising the sum of what we remember about all that has happened. Seen in this way, the set of historical events is much greater than the set of memorial events. Yet the set of all events often appears to be smaller than that of all remembered events because this latter always seems to be full, or certainly much fuller than the set of all events. So little of the sum total of what has happened is accessible that there seem to be far fewer members of the set of all past events than there are members of the set of all remembered events. Nonetheless, both positions are formally possible. The question is whether we begin our discussion of the relation between history and memory from the position of history or from the position of memory. If we commence fro...

The paper reflects about the need to introduce and develop approaches and tools for public services evaluation. Starting from the acknowledgment that investments in public services has dramatically increased over the last decade, we could state that they must also respond to new varieties of societal challenges and rising demands coming from service users. This pressure makes a strong push upon innovation considering that, if services must be designed to meet the complex needs of users, they also must reach a high rate of delivering cost efficiency.This article proposes an approach based on qualitative and quantitative measurements throughout the whole service design process in which service evaluation may represent a tool for value creation and a driver for innovation in public sector.Considering the emerging interest on evaluating design and innovation (OECD, 2010; European Commission, 2012) the authors try to explore existing evaluation methods for services in public sector, in o...

At our research centre we have employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach within a broad spectrum of projects to help us to better understand everyday human experience for the people for whom we wish to design. We have experimented with and explored creative ways to 'enter into' the lives of individuals and groups within diverse industry sectors. Finding new ways to capture lived experiences; understanding hidden 'meaning structures' within them and communicating these insights experientially are the goals driving this work. In this paper we share some examples of how we achieved these goals by infusing design thinking with hermeneutic phenomenology across four stages of our projects - Exploring; Sharing; Understanding and Showing How. These stages are kept rigorous by constantly referring back to philosophical first principles to inspire new techniques and 'ways into' the life-worlds of real people. We hope that designers and engineers will find these ...

This paper contributes to the current discourse on the role of artefacts in facilitating and triggering interaction among people. The discussion will focus on artefacts used as part of an interview method developed in order to discover knowledge that was observed but absent from both project reports and other documentation within multidisciplinary collaborative research projects, located within the field of Interaction Design. Using artefacts in an interview context enabled participants to reveal insights that were, in turn, participatory and human-centred. Thus the method was effective and appropriate in illuminating knowledge situated in interaction. This ethnomethodological tool enabled participants to reflexively externalize their understanding of the complex interactions that occur within projects, encouraging participation, interaction, visualization, reflection and communication through the use of tools aimed at capturing and illuminating the lived experiences of human engagement. These interviews were conducted with a selection of participants, chosen because they were researchers, working together within a cooperative research centre.

There seems to be a significant gap between the theoretical and the practical aspects of scheduling problems in the job shop environment. Theoretically, scheduling systems are designed on the basis of an optimum approach to the scheduling model. However in the practice, the optimum that is built into the scheduling applications seems to face some challenges when dealing with the dynamic character of a scheduling system, for instance machine breakdown or change of orders. Scheduling systems have become quite complex in the past few years. Competitive business environments and shorter product life cycles are the imminent challenges being faced by many companies these days. These challenges push companies to anticipate a demand driven supply chain in their business environment. A demand-driven supply chain incorporates the customer view into the supply chain processes. As a consequence of this, scheduling as a core process of the demand-driven supply chain must also reflect the customer view. In addition, other approaches to solving scheduling problems, for instance approaches based on human factors, prefer the scheduling system to be more flexible in both design and implementation. After discussion of these factors, the authors propose the integration of a different set of criteria for the development of scheduling systems which not only appears to have a better flexibility but also increased customer-focus.

This essay agrees with the editorial stance of this special issue of the AGDA research journal; that we cannot, as designers, separate ourselves from the social setting we inhabit. Saying that however, this essay makes the point that designers, and graphic designers in particular, often tend to deny their connection to the social setting and instead support design's sense of separation from the greater context. The essay makes the argument that with the change of name from graphic design to communication design, and the growing awareness of the ontological nature of design practice, it becomes essential to recognise that communication design is essentially a civil, or social, act.

The broader meaning of hermeneutics is presented, a meaning that cannot be reduced to the method of scientific research. It is assumed that the basis of hermeneutical rationality is the human way of life, which is characterized not by total self-control, but by a clear interweaving of unconscious and conscious processes. In this context, the thesis that the hermeneutical procedure is inextricably linked with social life, verbal communication, and the cognitive-emotional-volitional receptivity of others is explained. In addition, it is proved that the hermeneutical power of language is the basis of every stable and functional community, and long-term psychosocial integration and coexistence cannot be achieved by the opposite means, that is, through violence.

Microfinance is defined as the provision of financial services to poor, disadvantaged and underprivileged members of society, particularly in developing countries. Since the success of the Grameen Bank in the late 1970s, microfinance has emerged as a sustainable and effective method of poverty alleviation and local financial development. Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in the scale and reach of microfinance services around the world.

Persuasive design refers to technologies or design features created to intentionally change behaviour. These methods have been used to influence healthy habits, such as smart reminders for physical activity and environmental sustainability (Fogg 2002). However, with metrics that prioritise time spent, Social network sites (SNS) increasingly use persuasive design methods to compete for user attention. The user-friendly design of the Instagram mobile app is optimised to meet immediate user needs and desires, making it a valuable tool for connection and entertainment. Yet in recent years both media coverage and academic study have indicated that habitual SNS use contributes to increased levels of anxiety and social polarisation (Lukoff et al. 2018).
For this paper, Instagram serves as a tool to observe the impacts of persuasive design on individuals' behaviour. This study builds a picture of the design features that make the app habit-forming through primary interviews, corroborated by relevant HCI literature. Findings indicate that habit-driven user experiences on Instagram led users to feel a loss of autonomy. Participants reported that design patterns eroding natural stopping cues and personalised content feeds were prominent factors influencing their use of the app.

Dynamic scheduling problem has been an attractive area for researches to investigate since a long time. Many techniques have been used to tackle such problems, but all of these techniques require high efforts to formulate the dynamic scheduling problems inorder to obtain optimal solution. Using Heuristic or dispatching rules to solve the dynamic scheduling problem is efficient and popular manner to reach an acceptable level of scheduling. In this paper hybrid techniques are used in the proposed developed model. First the switching of four dispatching rules (Earliest Due Date (EDD), Slack Time (SLACK), Slack / Remaining Operations (S/ROP) and Priority Index) with the aim of choosing minimum tardy jobs. Second, scheduling-rescheduling approach is used to tackle the dynamic environment of job-shop problem depending on three level algorithms. Third, proposing three level algorithms, these levels are resource level, process planning level to improve scheduling with the aim of minimizing tardy jobs and shorten "order-to-delivery", and job level to design rescheduling policy depending on identified factors of each job order. The developed model is applied to real data from the Heavy Engineering Equipment State Company/Baghdad, and considerable advantages are observed. Applying the proposed model lead to zero number of tardy jobs (NT) and zero mean tardiness (MT). It is obvious from the obtained results that by adopting such model, a better solution for job orders' due dates can be achieved; hence "order-to-delivery" time can be shortened.

The manufacturing plant is viewed as a group of interacting subsystems. The research described in this paper is aimed at characterizing the subsystem interactions such that an intelligent system can make appropriate decisions in the face of shop floor contingencies. The goal of such decision making is to insure the meeting of global production goals by making real-time tradeoffs at the level of local subsystem goals. Manufacturing subsystems include receiving, shipping, production lines, maintenance, and material handling. It is assumed that subsystem interactions can be captured as schedule interactions. Active rescheduling is the use of manufacturing parameters as "cues" for triggering subsystem rescheduling. A distributed agent system is described, in which an agent represents a subsystem scheduler. Two agendas are employed: one for the posting of proposed schedule revisions and a second agenda for the processing of contingencies which must be resolved before proposed s...

This has been a journey with twists and turns and m any wonder ful people have 'stepped in' to walk it with me; I am deeply grateful to the following: Donald Mathe son: your generosity of spirit, patience, wisdom, sensitivity and wicked sense of humour inspired me to continue, helped me keep sane during and enabled me t o finish this thesis. Mike Grimshaw: your 'left-field' way of looking at the world provoked me to think-hard! Jim McLennan: Thank you so much for agreeing to 't ake me on' so late in the piece-you gave me the time I needed and the expertise that only a lifetime can provide. Chapter 9 and th e m ajor outcomes of this thesis are directly attributable to you. I am sincerely grateful to the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre who funded this thesis and for the many opportunities being one of their PhD students afforded me. I especially want to thank Lyndsey Wright who, during the upheaval of e arthquake s, enabled me to continue with my research. I also want to acknowledge the support of the University of Canterbury scholarship programme and the NZ Federation of Graduate Women. John Schauble: the many coffees over the past four ye ars were 'a ruse' to give me insight ful guidance and valuable support-you helped me understand what the 'real world' needed from my thesis, and that is priceless. This thesis could not have been done without the generous participation of the many lo vely folks in Australia who agreed to be interviewed and take part (over several months) in a survey. You gave your time and shared your thoughts-I am very grateful to all of you. Christine Gray: for four years you gave me a place to stay and a place to call home-I love you. Bindy Barclay: you 'talke d me down from the ledge' more than once-always supportive (always right!), and so, so wise. You should be running the UN. Denise Forbes: you were 'in my corner' every step of the way-this would have simply been so much harder without your support and friendship. Peter Sandman: thank you so much for engaging with my rese arch in such depth and replying with such thoughtfulness and insight to my rather pre sumptive em ails over the past five years. I hope to meet you one day. Arnold Parr: 8 year s ago you showed me why Sociology is the ' be st way to view' the world-you were the first to inspire me and there is no-one like you. Jess and Delyse: ever since we first sat in Biol106, your friendship and laughter got me through many lectures, countless exams and so much more. You mean the world to me (*sniff*). I have also been supported and 'cheered-on' by wonderful women who hail from near and faryou know who you are because you care enough about me to read this. At least one of you made me smile every day…or made me dinner. Barbara, not only were you unfailingly interested, but you made sure the fire was lit and the house warm. And a very special thanks to Alexis who cheerfully proofed this thesis (made me jam, bought me crayons). Mum and Dad, Cameron, Caitlin and Fraser: I have tried so hard to finish this as soon as I could because you all told me over and over that I could do this and were waiting at the finish line.

A dispatching policy can be defined as a set of condition-action (CA) rules in which changing job-shop circumstances (such as number of waiting jobs in queues, machine queue lengths in minutes or hours, overall system utilization, machine utilizations, material transport equipment utilizations, work-in-process, and the like) correspond to the condition part and the dispatching rules (shortest processing time first, earliest due date, modified due date, critical ratio, and the like) correspond to the action part. Having considered the fact that advanced manufacturing technologies can enable job shops to practice dispatching policies as efficient as dispatching rules, this paper introduces an intelligent scheduling system that can learn dispatching policies depending on the queue lengths of machines by using Pitts approach of genetics-based machine learning (GBML) for dynamic job shops. In our proposed intelligent scheduling system, the Pitts approach of GBML performs a matching betwe...

Social networks are significant in helping communities and individuals cope in disasters. Studies of communities hit by a catastrophe such as landslides or heatwaves demonstrate that people with well-connected social networks are more likely to recover than others where their networks are obliterated or non-existent. The value of social networks is also evident in bushfire. There is mounting evidence that information is passed between persons, such as family, friends and neighbours. Brenkert-Smith argues that social interactions are important in creating opportunities for residents to exchange information on shared risks and can lead them to take collective actions to address this risk. This paper presents on-going research on social networks of residents living in fire-prone areas in Australia to investigate how knowledge related to bushfire might flow, either in preparation for, or during a hypothetical emergency. A closer examination of social relations and characteristics within...

Scheduling of multiple parallel machines in the face of sequence dependent setups and downstream considerations is a hard problem. No single efficient algorithm is guaranteed to produce optimal results. We describe a solution for an instance of this problem, in the domain of paper manufacturing. The problem has additional job machine restrictions and fixed costs of assigning jobs to machines. We consider multiple objectives such as minimizing (weighted) tardiness, minimizing job-machine assignment costs. We solve the problem using a simple agent architecture called the Asynchronous team (A-team), in which agents cooperate by exchanging results. We have built agents each of which encapsulates a different problem solving strategy for solving the multi-machine scheduling problem. The A-team framework enables the agents to cooperate to produce better results than those of any individual agent. In this paper we define the problem, describe the individual agents, and show with experimental results that the A-team produces very good results compared to schedulers alone.