Suchergebnisse

This presentation highlight a new initiative at the Montana State University Library: User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP). The goals of the UXUP project are both practical and political. Practically, UXUP aims to create better user experiences for our campus's Native American student population. Politically, UXUP aims to create new space for Native voices to enter the decision-making structures of the Library. To achieve these goals, we followed the methodology of Participatory Design, which has its roots in Scandinavian systems design of the 1970s. Participatory Design begins with the idea that the user and the designer each possess skills and perspectives of equal worth. This equity is realized through a practice of collaborative power-sharing and decision-making that deeply connects the user with the design outcome. For the UXUP project, the Library worked with our Native American community to develop a participatory design practice anchored by a Native American student group empowered to make design decisions. This talk will overview our design principles, process, and products, including a discussion of the connections between Scandinavian participatory design and indigenous research methodologies that seek to deconstruct oppressive, colonial power structures. The UXUP project can serve as a model for empathetic and collaborative design research.

How can we ensure that Native American undergraduate students feel welcome and empowered on campus? Participatory Design offers one answer to this question. Participatory Design is a socially-active, politically-conscious, values-driven approach to co-creation that seeks to give voice to those who have been traditionally unheard. A group of faculty and Native American students at Montana State University created an Indigenous Participatory Design Toolkit that provides a practical approach for collaboration among Native and Non-Native stakeholders that centers Indigenous worldviews. Through Indigenous Participatory Design, Native students are empowered as self-determining storytellers to co-create products and services in higher education.

This is a first report on a long-term project concerned with the managerial implications of the development of advanced computer systems, for administrative purposes, in manufacturing firms. In this pilot stage, the management systems of two large firms—one in electrical components, the other in chemicals—were studied. The attitudes and behaviour of managers towards various aspects of computerization were analysed, and related to the structural characteristics of the two management groups. In respect of the latter, the guide-lines were the cosmopolitan/local continuum of A. W. Gouldner, and the organismic/mechanistic typology of T. Burns and G. M. Stalker. The data suggest that at least certain important components of both the cosmopolitan and organismic concepts are related to positive attitudes to computerization.