Voices and Views
Integrating XR Technologies to Teach Socially Engaged Design of Complex Systems View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katie Snyder, Aditi Verma
As the engineered and built environment continues to play an ever larger role in our world and undergirds nearly every aspect of human life, it is important that engineered systems be designed and built in ethical and equitable ways. Yet most engineers, especially those designing complex infrastructures, are seldom taught how to engage with publics and design in socially engaged ways. Here, we describe our approaches for teaching socially engaged design of nuclear energy technologies as part of the freshman design course at our home institution. We did so by integrating XR technologies into our course to (1) facilitate student learning about nuclear engineering technologies and the fundamental scientific and engineering principles underpinning their design; (2) offer students opportunities for presenting complex information to and receiving input from peers and members of the public and; (3) incorporate this input into technology and facility design decisions, thus carrying out a design-build-test (DBT) cycle in XR environments. Two primary innovations take shape in this project: Engaging in the DBT process in XR prepares students to be critical users and designers of emergent technologies. These skills will be particularly valuable as XR becomes more common in the global workplace.The second innovation, using XR to facilitate community engagement in the energy technology design process may serve as a model that could be applied widely in the US and beyond to help foster trust between communities and energy experts and amplify minoritized voices often unheard in the energy technology design and clean energy transition conversations.
Designing the Future of Human Interaction: A Product Semantic Approach to Design Teaching and Design Thinking View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mekin Elcioglu
Numerous approaches to product and design prove to create many opportunities on a domestic and a global scale for every user. The new user typology has also changed throughout the decades with technological advancements and the internet. Different approaches to design, connectivity, accessibility, affordability, productivity, and motivation became key factors that need to be analyzed while testing academic models in the design field for educating next generation of designers and users. The physiological and psychological effects of design should be examined in order to understand and establish design in a way to serve multitude of behavioral factors and expectations of humans. Design’s progressiveness and accessibility depend upon adapting to new movements and trends more frequently now than ever before which originated from social, cultural, and technological necessities. Due to technological improvements and capabilities, many of the physical interface that created essential connection between products and the user is lost and all products and services are affected. Humans used to benefit from products and services for various purposes; self-motivation, communication, and wellbeing being a few critical ones. This research is utilizing Product Semantics methodology and it is intended to validate the sense of wellbeing, how human cognition and biological processes could be affected by concepts of applied psychology and cognitive science that provide design field with an understanding of human behaviors with theories underlying choice, decision-making, perception, affordances, attention, and interaction for consciousness and self-value. It identifies critical concepts and components of ‘new paradigms’ from a Product Semantic standpoint.
Exploring Automated Thematic Analysis of YouTube Comments Relevant to Social Support in Postpartum Depression Using Machine Learning Techniques View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anila Virani, Piper Jackson, Ahsan Mollani
The primary purpose of this study is to explore the feasibility of using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automate the thematic analysis of YouTube comments posted by viewers relevant to social support in postpartum depression. We systematically collected and manually analyzed 7,243 YouTube comments on postpartum depression from January 2022 to June 2023. We compared human and NLP-generated themes using five supervised machine learning algorithms for accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and the ability to balance minority and majority class representation. The dataset was split into an 80/20 ratio respectively for training and testing purposes, optimized through hyperparameter tuning and 10-fold cross-validation. Each algorithm was tested in various scenarios: with class weighting, with SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique), and without either. The Logistic Regression algorithms with class weight balancing demonstrated the best overall performance, achieving an accuracy of 0.69 and a fair balance in handling minority classes. Although the Support Vector Machine algorithms with class weight balancing also achieved an accuracy of 0.69, it was comparatively less effective in representing minority classes making it the second-best choice. Social media can provide valuable insights into social support; however, the labour-intensive nature of this work creates barriers to utilizing this data. The findings explore the potential of using NLP in automating the thematic analysis of social support in other health-related conditions and provide a comparison of various machine learning algorithms that can best support such analysis.
Architecturing the Future Citizen Competencies System: Use of ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 International Standards as Ontology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Faouzi Bouslama, Lana Hiasat
The future citizen competencies (FCC) are critically important to societies as they contribute to the overall well-being, development, and sustainability of communities and societies. These competencies go beyond traditional academic knowledge and skills, emphasizing qualities and capabilities that prepare individuals as well as groups of people to thrive in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Current approaches to creating conceptual models of such complex systems focus mainly on assessment tools and interventions. Moreover, there is no standard approach that establishes this conceptual framework for the architectural description of a future citizen competencies system. In this paper, we use the ISO/IEC/ IEEE 42010 Standard created for developing intensive software systems and apply it to the architecturing of a Future Citizen Competencies (FCC) system. The proposed FCC system includes social and emotional skills such as self-awareness, empathy, communication, teamwork, and adaptability. These skills contribute to positive interpersonal relationships, effective collaboration, and the ability to manage emotions, all of which are crucial for personal and societal well-being. The ISO/IEC/ IEEE 42010 Standard is used to address the conceptualization and creation of the architecture of the FCC system through the identification of the system’s components and the architecture descriptions. It provides an essential ontology to define the concepts, relationships, and properties that characterize the FCC domain and its architecture, and the entities within it. The use of such standards is expected to help manage the complexities faced by stakeholders of the FCC system.
