This paper examines how a serious game approach could support a participatory planning process by bringing stakeholders together to discuss interventions that assist the development of sustainable urban tourism. A serious policy game was designed and played in six European cities by a total of 73 participants, reflecting a diverse array of tourism stakeholders. By observing in-game experiences, a pre- and post -game survey and short interviews six months after playing the game, the process and impact of the game was investigated. While it proved difficult to evaluate the value of a serious game approach, results demonstrate that enacting real-life policymaking in a serious game setting can enable stakeholders to come together, and become more aware of the issues and complexities involved with urban tourism planning. This suggests a serious game can be used to stimulate the uptake of academic insights in a playful manner. However, it should be remembered that a game is a tool and does not, in itself, lead to inclusive participatory policymaking and more sustainable urban tourism planning. Consequently, care needs to be taken to ensure inclusiveness and prevent marginalization or disempowerment both within game-design and the political formation of a wider participatory planning approach.
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From the article : "In this paper the implications of different research approaches and methods are illustrated by using two projects of the authors. Both projects take place in the same context: exploring participatory innovation within Small-to-Medium sized Enterprizes (SMEs). The main aspects coming forward when comparing the research characteristics of both projects are the importance of time and momentum, the structural set up of the project, people or participants and the abilities of the people involved. The research goal and the background of the researcher are main determinants for the chosen research methods. We hope with this paper to make researchers aware of the implications of the research methods and approach on the results of the project."
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Improved cookstoves aimed at reducing exposure to indoor air pollution have had a lasting presence in development and health discussions. Through this article we contribute to current debates in the field by reflecting on our experiences during a cookstove participatory project in two ‘non-notified’ communities, or ‘slums,’ in Bangalore, India. We interrogate the alignment between some of the central tenets and methods of participation and the lived experiences of participating communities. The current predominant recommendations focus on developing and implementing cookstoves tailored for user needs. Yet, the project implementation entered a space of uncertainty where the priorities and needs of participants were diverse and changing. While urban infrastructures related to housing and work security, drainage systems, access to health care, and aspects of governance, citizenship and rights, may seem to fall outside the scope of ICS projects, our experiences show how inescapably they shape participatory processes and technologies. We highlight the need to take a closer look at how we can include these broader and changing priorities and needs in our methodologies and reflect on how we can better respond and align them with the ways in which people live.
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This project addresses the fundamental societal problem that encryption as a technique is available since decades, but has never been widely adopted, mostly because it is too difficult or cumbersome to use for the public at large. PGP illustrates this point well: it is difficult to set-up and use, mainly because of challenges in cryptographic key management. At the same time, the need for encryption has only been growing over the years, and has become an urgent problem with stringent requirements – for instance for electronic communication between doctors and patients – in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and with systematic mass surveillance activities of internationally operating intelligence agencies. The interdisciplinary project "Encryption for all" addresses this fundamental problem via a combination of cryptographic design and user experience design. On the cryptographic side it develops identity-based and attribute-based encryption on top of the attribute-based infrastructure provided by the existing IRMA-identity platform. Identity-based encryption (IBE) is a scientifically well-established technique, which addresses the key management problem in an elegant manner, but IBE has found limited application so far. In this project it will be developed to a practically usable level, exploiting the existing IRMA platform for identification and retrieval of private keys. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has not reached the same level of maturity yet as IBE, and will be a topic of further research in this project, since it opens up attractive new applications: like a teacher encrypting for her students only, or a company encrypting for all employees with a certain role in the company. On the user experience design side, efforts will be focused on making these encryption techniques really usable (i.e., easy to use, effective, efficient, error resistant) for everyone (e.g., also for people with disabilities or limited digital skills). To do so, an iterative, human-centred and inclusive design approach will be adopted. On a fundamental level, scientific questions will be addressed, such as how to promote the use of security and privacy-enhancing technologies through design, and whether and how usability and accessibility affect the acceptance and use of encryption tools. Here, theories of nudging and boosting and the unified theory of technology acceptance and use (known as UTAUT) will serve as a theoretical basis. On a more applied level, standards like ISO 9241-11 on usability and ISO 9241-220 on the human-centred design process will serve as a guideline. Amongst others, interface designs will be developed and focus groups, participatory design sessions, expert reviews and usability evaluations with potential users of various ages and backgrounds will be conducted, in a user experience and observation laboratory available at HAN University of Applied Sciences. In addition to meeting usability goals, ensuring that the developed encryption techniques also meet national and international accessibility standards will be a particular point of focus. With respect to usability and accessibility, the project will build on the (limited) usability design experiences with the mobile IRMA application.
Since the COVID-19-pandemic, the enormous societal, medical and financial impact associated with the transfer of infectious pathogens from wild animals to humans and other animals urged for further follow-up in early signalling management of zoonotic diseases. Consequently, the Raad-voor-Dierenaangelegenheden and the Dutch government currently recommend to set up a surveillance system and cooperation with (applied-)scientists to detect zoonotic diseases using data and samples from animals entering wildlife rehabilitation centres. Each year approximately 100,000 wild animals are submitted to ±78 Dutch wildlife rehabilitation centres. This would potentially generate an enormous amount of currently unutilized information, which could reduce disease incidence and avoid the problems of scaling-up disease control if early detection can be improved. The current wild animal health surveillance system could be much enhanced if wild animals taken into care by wildlife rehabilitation centres would be consistently registered, processed and shared. However the processes, technology and biological knowhow to do this are currently not up to standards. Besides for this to work, wildlife rehabilitation centres need to be more strongly aligned and strongly embedded in the current health networks. Therefore, our objective is to develop a sustainable participatory collaboration system in the current health networks, on which first the focus is on valid and reliable data bundling of animals and their diseases from wildlife rehabilitation centres. These data can be made applicable to scientific research and the professional field to be able to signal the risks of (inter)national zoonotic diseases. We will focus our methodology on the societal, technical and biological elements involved. Van Hall Larenstein Hogeschool, Wageningen University, the Dutch Wildlife Health Centre, the National-Institute-for-Public-Health-and-the-Environment, Falcon together with Dutch wildlife rehabilitation centres will develop the fundaments of the surveillance system. The Foundation DierenLot, the Ministry-of-Agriculture-Nature-and-Food-quality, Flemish wildlife rehabilitation centres, vets, and governmental organisations are partners, among others.
