Assistive technology supports maintenance or improvement of an individual’s functioning and independence, though for people in need the access to assistive products is not always guaranteed. This paper presents a generic quality framework for assistive technology service delivery that can be used independent of the setting, context, legislative framework, or type of technology. Based on available literature and a series of discussions among the authors, a framework was developed. It consists of 7 general quality criteria and four indicators for each of these criteria. The criteria are: accessibility; competence; coordination; efficiency; flexibility; user centeredness, and infrastructure. This framework can be used at a micro level (processes around individual users), meso level (the service delivery scheme or programme) or at a macro level (the whole country). It aims to help identify in an easy way the main strengths and weaknesses of a system or process, and thus guide possible improvements. As a next step in the development of this quality framework the authors propose to organise a global consultancy process to obtain responses from stakeholders across the world and to plan a number of case studies in which the framework is applied to different service delivery systems and processes in different countries.
DOCUMENT
Business decisions and business logic are important organizational assets. As transparency is becoming an increasingly important aspect for organizations, business decisions and underlying business logic, i.e., their business rules, must be implemented, in information systems, in such a way that transparency is guaranteed as much as possible. Based on previous research, in this study, we aim to identify how current design principles for business rules management add value in terms of transparency. To do so, a recently published transparency framework is decomposed into criteria, which are evaluated against the current business rules management principles. This evaluation revealed that eight out of twenty-two design principles do not add value to transparency, which should be taken into account when the goal of an organization is to increase transparency. Future research should focus on how to implement the design principles that add to transparency.
DOCUMENT
News media in The Netherlands show great variety in the extent and ways, in which they realize media accountability online in terms of actor transparency, product transparency and feedback opportunities online. It is suggested that even those news rooms that seem to adhere to transparency and public accountability still need to explore the functionality and application of media accountability instruments (MAI). Both in terms of potentials and pitfalls, news rooms need to consider about what they want to be transparent and in what ways. To the extent that online innovations are visible, traditional news media seem to experiment, as is the case with newsroom blogs or the project of hyper local journalism Dichtbij.nl, part of the Telegraaf Company. Various news media have on-going projects on audience participation, online applications and distribution models. However, since many projects merely aim at finding new applications, processes, platforms and business models, it remains to be seen assess whether projects are indeed reasonably innovative and feasible at the same time. The development of an online and therefore immediate, archived, personalized and interactive context, offers practical and ethical challenges to Dutch journalism. These challenges bring shifts in its role and responsibility to society. It means that changes occur in what journalists are accountable for, as well as ways in how they are accountable. The Dutch media landscape lodges various professional accountability instruments like the press council and both profession-wide and news media specific codes of ethics, but some of these instruments receive only moderate support. Proactive openness is more an exception than the rule and may well be a distinctive indicator for quality journalism. Although news media often acknowledge the importance of media accountability offline and online, they often lack the resources or courage to use them or have different priorities. This ambiguous position may indicate that in relation to media accountability online, Dutch news media are between hope and fear: that it will either improve their relationship with the public and fuel professional quality, or ask too much of resources with too little benefit.
DOCUMENT
Smart city technologies, including artificial intelligence and computer vision, promise to bring a higher quality of life and more efficiently managed cities. However, developers, designers, and professionals working in urban management have started to realize that implementing these technologies poses numerous ethical challenges. Policy papers now call for human and public values in tech development, ethics guidelines for trustworthy A.I., and cities for digital rights. In a democratic society, these technologies should be understandable for citizens (transparency) and open for scrutiny and critique (accountability). When implementing such public values in smart city technologies, professionals face numerous knowledge gaps. Public administrators find it difficult to translate abstract values like transparency into concrete specifications to design new services. In the private sector, developers and designers still lack a ‘design vocabulary’ and exemplary projects that can inspire them to respond to transparency and accountability demands. Finally, both the public and private sectors see a need to include the public in the development of smart city technologies but haven’t found the right methods. This proposal aims to help these professionals to develop an integrated, value-based and multi-stakeholder design approach for the ethical implementation of smart city technologies. It does so by setting up a research-through-design trajectory to develop a prototype for an ethical ‘scan car’, as a concrete and urgent example for the deployment of computer vision and algorithmic governance in public space. Three (practical) knowledge gaps will be addressed. With civil servants at municipalities, we will create methods enabling them to translate public values such as transparency into concrete specifications and evaluation criteria. With designers, we will explore methods and patterns to answer these value-based requirements. Finally, we will further develop methods to engage civil society in this processes.
With the help of sensors that made data collection and processing possible, many products around us have become “smarter”. The situation that our car, refrigerator, or umbrella communicating with us and each other is no longer a future scenario; it is increasingly a shared reality. There are good examples of such connectedness such as lifestyle monitoring of elderly persons or waste management in a smart city. Yet, many other smart products are designed just for the sake of embedding a chip in something without thinking through what kind of value they add everyday life. In other words, the design of these systems have mainly been driven by technology until now and little studies have been carried out on how the design of such systems helps citizens to improve or maintain the quality of their individual and collective lives. The CREATE-IT research center creates new solutions and methodologies in “digital design” that contribute to the quality of life of citizens. Correspondingly, this proposal focuses on one type of digital design—smart products—and investigate the concept of empowerment in relation to the design of smart products. In particular, the proposal aims to develop a model with its supplementary tools and methods for designing such products better. By following a research-through-design methodology, the proposal intends to offer a critical understanding on designing smart products. Along with its theoretical contribution, the proposal will also aid the students of ICT and design, and professionals such as designers and engineers to create smart products that will empower people and the industry to develop products grounded in a clear user experience and business model.
