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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
Achievement of many long-term goals requires sustained practice over long durations. Examples include goals related to areas of high personal and societal benefit, such as physical fitness, which requires a practice of frequent exercise; self-education, which requires a practice of frequent study; or personal productivity, which requires a practice of performing work. Maintaining these practices can be difficult, because even though obvious benefits come with achieving these goals, an individual's willpower may not always be sufficient to sustain the required effort. This dissertation advocates addressing this problem by designing novel interfaces that provide people with new practices that are fun and enjoyable, thereby reducing the need for users to draw upon willpower when pursuing these long-term goals. To draw volitional usage, these practice-oriented interfaces can integrate key characteristics of existing activities, such as music-making and other hobbies, that are already known to draw voluntary participation over long durations. This dissertation makes several key contributions to provide designers with the necessary tools to create practice-oriented interfaces. First, it consolidates and synthesizes key ideas from fields such as activity theory, self-determination theory, HCI design, and serious leisure. It also provides a new conceptual framework consisting of heuristics for designing systems that draw new users, plus heuristics for making systems that will continue drawing usage from existing users over time. These heuristics serve as a collection of useful ideas to consider when analyzing or designing systems, and this dissertation postulates that if designers build these characteristics into their products, the resulting systems will draw more volitional usage. To demonstrate the framework's usefulness as an analytical tool, it is applied as a set of analytical lenses upon three previously-existing experiential media systems. To demonstrate its usefulness as a design tool, the framework is used as a guide in the development of an experiential media system called pdMusic. This system is installed at public events for user studies, and the study results provide qualitative support for many framework heuristics. Lastly, this dissertation makes recommendations to scholars and designers on potential future ways to examine the topic of volitional usage.
ContributorsWallis, Isaac (Author) / Ingalls, Todd (Thesis advisor) / Coleman, Grisha (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Engineering higher education is growing rapidly across the world, especially in the Global South. For many of these countries, the dominant engineering university models were imported and established by colonial European empires. These imported systems of higher education and engineering evolved to meet the local contexts of Europe and the United States in response to political and technological change. Today, engineers are being seen by national and international policymakers as key for innovation and technological development. Given that these models are exogenous to these countries and may carry embedded design values that correspond to the needs of the Global North, this study explores how engineering universities are aligned with societal values in Cameroon, a country with three colonial legacies, a highly diverse institutional landscape, and an engineering university system that is rapidly expanding.To assess the alignment of the Cameroonian engineering education system with Cameroonian perceptions of the common good, this dissertation employs a modified public value mapping method, comparing exogenous public values with endogenous perceptions of public value success or failure. Exogenous values embedded in global engineering education are determined using historical analysis of the evolution of engineering and higher education models in Europe and the United States. Endogenous perceptions of public value success or failure associated with Cameroonian engineering education are determined using a grounded analysis of 49 semi-structured interviews and focus groups. These two sets of values are mapped using historical narrative analysis to illuminate the social impacts of exogenous educational models.
This study finds that the engineering curriculum, institutional models of innovation, and methods of academic advancement are all perceived by Cameroonians to be misaligned with the public good. While a grassroots technology start-up culture, inspired by Silicon Valley, has been modified to meet the perceived common good. Furthermore, there is evidence that private grassroots engineering universities may hold stronger ties with their surrounding community than state supported institutions, thus addressing a societal value that would otherwise be neglected. This study suggests that both endogenous and modified exogenous models are more likely to meet perceptions of the common good, while models which are developed outside of a culture are more likely to be perceived as misaligned with societal goals.
ContributorsStribling, Eric (Author) / Parmentier, Mary Jane (Thesis advisor) / Dabars, William B. (Committee member) / Karwat, Darshan M. A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The tradition of building musical robots and automata is thousands of years old. Despite this rich history, even today musical robots do not play with as much nuance and subtlety as human musicians. In particular, most instruments allow the player to manipulate timbre while playing; if a violinist is told to sustain an E, they will select which string to play it on, how much bow pressure and velocity to use, whether to use the entire bow or only the portion near the tip or the frog, how close to the bridge or fingerboard to contact the string, whether or not to use a mute, and so forth. Each one of these choices affects the resulting timbre, and navigating this timbre space is part of the art of playing the instrument. Nonetheless, this type of timbral nuance has been largely ignored in the design of musical robots. Therefore, this dissertation introduces a suite of techniques that deal with timbral nuance in musical robots. Chapter 1 provides the motivating ideas and introduces Kiki, a robot designed by the author to explore timbral nuance. Chapter 2 provides a long history of musical robots, establishing the under-researched nature of timbral nuance. Chapter 3 is a comprehensive treatment of dynamic timbre production in percussion robots and, using Kiki as a case-study, provides a variety of techniques for designing striking mechanisms that produce a range of timbres similar to those produced by human players. Chapter 4 introduces a machine-learning algorithm for recognizing timbres, so that a robot can transcribe timbres played by a human during live performance. Chapter 5 introduces a technique that allows a robot to learn how to produce isolated instances of particular timbres by listening to a human play an examples of those timbres. The 6th and final chapter introduces a method that allows a robot to learn the musical context of different timbres; this is done in realtime during interactive improvisation between a human and robot, wherein the robot builds a statistical model of which timbres the human plays in which contexts, and uses this to inform its own playing.
ContributorsKrzyzaniak, Michael Joseph (Author) / Coleman, Grisha (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation examines the nexus of three trends in electricity systems transformations underway worldwide—the scale-up of renewable energy, regionalization, and liberalization. Interdependent electricity systems are being envisioned that require partnership and integration across power disparities. This research explores how actors in the Mediterranean region envisioned a massive scale-up of renewable energy within a single electricity system and market across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. It asks: How are regional sociotechnical systems envisioned? What are the anticipated consequences of a system for a region with broad disparities and deep sociopolitical differences? What can be learned about energy justice by examining this vision at multiple scales? A sociotechnical systems framework is used to analyze energy transformations, interweaving the technical aspects with politics, societal effects, and political development issues. This research utilized mixed qualitative methods to analyze Mediterranean electricity transformations at multiple scales, including fieldwork in Morocco and Germany, document analysis, and event ethnography. Each scale—from a global history of concentrating solar power technologies to a small village in Morocco—provides a different lens on the sociotechnical system and its implications for justice. This study updates Thomas Hughes’ Networks of Power, the canonical history of the sociotechnical development of electricity systems, by adding new aspects to sociotechnical electricity systems theory. First, a visioning process now plays a crucial role in guiding innovation and has a lasting influence on the justice outcomes. Second, rather than simply providing people with heat and light, electrical power systems in the 21st century are called upon to address complex integrated solutions. Furthermore, building a sustainable energy system is now a retrofitting agenda, as system builders must graft new infrastructure on top of old systems. Third, the spatial and temporal aspects of sociotechnical energy systems should be amended to account for constructed geography and temporal complexity. Fourth, transnational electricity systems pose new challenges for politics and political development. Finally, this dissertation presents a normative framework for conceptualizing and evaluating energy justice. Multi-scalar, systems-level justice requires collating diverse ideas about energy justice, expanding upon them based on the empirical material, and evaluating them with this framework.
ContributorsMoore, Sharlissa (Author) / Hackett, Ed J. (Thesis advisor) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Parmentier, Mary Jane (Committee member) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Millions of people around the world daily engage in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM)––a vital part of total global gold production. For Colombia, this mining accounts for most of the precious metal’s output. It has also made Colombia, per capita, the worst mercury-polluted country in the world. Though cleaner, safer, and more effective methods exist, miners yet opt for mercury-use. Any success with interventions in technology, capacitation, or policy has been limited. This dissertation attends to mercury-use in ASGM in Antioquia, Colombia, via two gaps: a descriptive one (i.e., a failure to pay attention to, and to describe, actual practices in ASGM); and, a theoretical one (i.e., explanations as to why some decisions, including but not limited to policy, succeed or fail). In addition to an ecology of practices, embodiment, and situated knowledges, phenomenological interviews with stakeholders illuminate critical lived experience, as well as whether or how it is possible to reduce mercury-use and contamination. Furthermore, a novel application of speculative sound supplements this work. Finally, key findings complement existing scholarship. The presence of gold drives mining, but an increase in mining comes at a cost. Miners know mercury is hazardous, but mining legally, or formally, has proven too onerous. So, mercury-use persists: it is profitable, and the effects on human health can seem delayed. The state is pivotal to change in mercury-use, but its approach has been punitive. Change will invariably require greater attention to the lived experiences of miners.
ContributorsPimentel, Matthew (Author) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Thesis advisor) / Parmentier, Mary Jane (Thesis advisor) / Coleman, Grisha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021