Fortunately or unfortunately, we all living under one roof - the earth, and we only have limited resource and time to produce something useful for most of us, thus we have to follow economic of scales and compromise between common use/user interface and different user perspectives/needs.

In the post regarding favorite and least favorite gadget, Brian states that his least favorite being “the panic alarm on my car key”. He argued that he did not see the value of it but only annoyance when it was often accidentally triggered at the least desired moments. However, I always appreciate the thoughts of Acura manufactures ever considering putting that little red button there on my car key and probably millions others. Although I have never once used it, and it seems well-designed not to be easily triggered unless you push it down hard, it is definitely an assurance for me knowing its availability, and hopefully it will function the day and time when I need it. It would be nice too with a built-in pepper spray for use at a place far from my car. I think multiple factors could influence mine and Brian’s perceptions towards this. One could be the gender difference. In the 2003 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, female students were more likely than male students to fear for their safety both at school and away from school. Another factor could be the experience of a malfunctioning button. I was surely annoyed by someone’s super-sensitive car alarm that had been on since 4am in a storm morning. Other factors could be the perceived knowledge about social status of women and crime rate on parking lots. I perceive generally women are weaker than men therefore are more likely to be targets of violence and crimes. I also perceive crimes often happen on parking lots, especially at night. My perceived knowledge may be influences by reading the monthly campus crime reports that I receive in email, watching late night news, CIS TV series, and recent campus shootings.

In the post regarding circuit city’s business strategy of “order online, pick up at store”, Nathan states that he couldn’t find a good reason for the strategy except that for “people who feel afraid of having something broken or lost during shipping”, and who is purchasing an expensive item. Yesenia, on the other hand, thinks this is a thoughtful business strategy that allows buyers to compare price with other stores without driving to multiple places, also saves business costs by reducing the work load of sales representatives at the store. I agree with Yesenia more. Both me and my husband are frequent online shoppers. We found this strategy very attractive, and I think that the business companies like circus city and best buy have some smart financial engineer working on their formulas behind scene. One important fact about “order online, pick up at store” is that sometimes price for the same item online can be much lower than the one in store, which usually accompanies with discounts, mail-in-rebates or other promotions. Furthermore, there are many items that could be available online but not in store. If you don’t want to wait a long time for the item to arrive, or pay expensive shipping fee, you can print out the order summary from email, bring to the store with your ID and credit card used, pick it up and enjoy it today. You could even order several items from different web sites and make the shortest route possible to pick them up from various stores.

In conclusion, product designers, business and decision makers must examine the target market of their product, examine target customers’ perceived value of the product through usability tests and survey studies in order to make outstanding products that meet their needs at the most efficient way.

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A design theory is prescriptive and not explanatory or predictive in nature. Walls et al. (1992) proposed that an ISDT should “be a prescriptive theory which integrates normative and descriptive theories into design paths intended to produce more effective information systems.” Walls et al. (1992) believe that the purpose of a design theory is to support the achievement of goals. Thus, a design theory describes how to achieve a goal and not what the goal should be. They state that designing in IS involves designing products, work practices, information, and technology. In addition, many of the elements of information systems are artifacts that have to be designed. Walls et al. define four levels of usage for ISDTs. They are: 1) ISDT is used as a cloak of theoretical legitimacy, 2) ISDT is used as a common language and framework, 3) ISDT is used as a way of generating new insights about the characteristics of a new class of information systems, and 3) the richness of ISDT itself is enhanced. Thus, ISDT theories allow the developing of a new class of artifacts.

In an IS design research study, the design theory specifies the design of a prototype for the new system that helps in the delivery of goals in a more efficient and effective way and ultimately benefit the end-users. Generally, the design processes involve 3 iterative steps: First, build the kernel theories using the ISDT framework. Second, develop the meta-requirements, meta-design for the system using the kernel theories. Third, test and enrich the ISDT theory by evaluating the design artifacts (including the design product and processes), whether the artifact achieves the research goals.

I think the ground breaking of ISDT is its systematic approach for designing any IS system. This differentiate from the traditional way in which systems are often initiated, designed and developed based upon poor defined user requirements that were collected in a limit time and costs. For practitioners ISDTs are beneficial because they increase development reliability and the likelihood of success by providing principles, derived from kernel theories, that limit the range of system features and development activities to a more manageable set (Markus et al., 2002). ISDT approach also helps fostering exploring transdeciplinary theories and knowledge and use them as kernel theories for building the artifact. Both the principles and the artifact generated as part of an ISDT are also open to empirical testing and thus can form a basis for further research.

Walls, J. G., Widmeyer, G. R., & El Sawy, O. A. (1992). “Building an Information System Design Theory for Vigilant EIS.” Information Systems Research 3: 36-58.

Markus, M. L., Majchrzak, A. & Gasser, L. (2002) A Design Theory for Systems that Support Emergent Knowledge Processes. MIS Quarterly, 26, 179-212.

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My favorite gadget – Gmail

I love Gmail since the day I started using it. Now I use my four Gmail accounts everyday except the days I really do not have Internet access or my computer nearby. Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that combines the best features of traditional email with Google's search technology. Here’s why:

1. Storage - Gmail includes more than 2,500 megabytes of storage space - that's over two gigabytes, for free! Not only I can just leave the power point slides, pdf files, and photos I receive, with so much space, I can just turn Gmail into a file server of my own – a good enough reason to give up Hotmail’s 250MB storage!
2. Speed & Search – The speed of reading, receiving, sending mail, attaching files, and displaying search results are just superb. I’ve never seen a faster search in any email service or desktop application.
3. Auto-refresh & auto-save – Gmail auto-refresh the page every couple seconds so that new emails will just show up in the inbox. While in Hotmail, you need to continue clicking the inbox button or refresh the page to see if any new mail. Every few seconds, Gmail auto-save the message that I am constructing into draft, without much delay doing it.
4. Spell-check – I love their spell-check. It’s easy to use and save my time.
5. Anti-spamming – Hotmail is horrible on anti-spamming! I’ve been using Gmail for over two years now and received no spam that I can remember.
6. Filters & Labels - You can create up to 20 filters to manage the flow of incoming messages. Use filters so that certain messages bypass the inbox, are automatically labeled, or both. You can also automatically forward messages to another email address using filters. Labels are like email folders, only better. You can add multiple labels to a conversation (instead of being forced to choose only one folder) and you can search for messages by label name.
7. Google talk and contacts – anyone in your contacts using a Gmail account will have an indication of green dot when they are online and using Gmail, so you can chat with them via Google talk. You can choose to save the content of the chats, or not.
8. Interface – the interface is clean and simple, with all traditional look and feel. The ads on the sidebar are text-only, keyword-sensitive (which match the Gmail content you are reading/writing).

I noticed thousands of posts on the Web just about how they love Gmail. I am glad that we share the same opion.

My least favorite gadget – IPod

I hate my IPod mini. The only thing I like about it is that it’s pink and it looks cute. When I got it, the product was so hot that I saw it everyday in TV commercials, newspaper or magazine. These days I see it more in bank advertisement that if you open a checking account you get a IPod shuffle for free, no kidding!

Anyway I hate it because it is so difficult to use. I hate it because it takes me more time to find a desired song than listening to it. I never figure out how to use the wheel (menu). Trust me, I tried. There are only four icons (Menu, backward, forward and play/pause) on the wheel for users to explore hierarchical folders. Since I cannot view all hierarchical folders at once like you use explorer on Windows system, I always bet the luck finding what you look for. If I realized it is the wrong folder that I went after dozens of “forward” and I need to go back layer by layer, also I need to use “menu” instead of “backward”. Where is the logic? I couldn’t help but wonder. Next, make circles on the wheel to scroll down a long list and find my song is tiring, which really discouraging me changing a song since I wouldn’t know how far to move the scroll wheel to get to the desire location.

Most of the time I can figure out how software work without having to read the instruction or menu, even a DLink router configuration interface. But I never figure out how to import new music into my IPod and so that I don’t lose the previous lists. I hate the iTune just as much as I hate IPod.

I am not alone, there’re thousand of posts on the Web just about how much they hate the design of this product, here’s one detailed example, http://www.mobilecommunitydesign.com/archives/000152.php

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You can use this part of Elgg as a wiki, to collaboratively work on projects, or to create an online portfolio. You can create links to new pages by simply enclosing the page title using double bracket characters ([ and ]). Here's an example of a link to this Home Page.

 So like, this is a wiki page, right?

 This feels similar to the one with tikiwiki?

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Create your new page here!

 Ah, this is a new page, right?

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You can use this part of Elgg as a wiki, to collaboratively work on projects, or to create an online portfolio. You can create links to new pages by simply enclosing the page title using double bracket characters ([ and ]). Here's an example of a link to this Home Page.

 So like, this is a wiki page, right?

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Write a response to ONE of today’s guest lectures and post it to your personal blog.

President Klitgaard stated that being a transdisciplinary scholar could enrich his or her research work with more enlightenment and credibility. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) seems an extreme case of such scholar. For more than half a millennium, his Renaissance integration of engineering with human values has inspired technologist, scientists, and artists. In the book “Leonardo’s laptop”, Shneiderman stated “What I like about Leonardo is that he was more than just a Renaissance geek. His playful side flourished in performing on the lyre and stating musical events. He even fabricated theatrical sets, complete with dancing lion puppets. This combination of skills delights us every today and can suggest future toys and entertainment.” (pp. 3).

As a young IS scholar myself, I speak “a digital vernacular”, and have followed “a working trajectory that encompasses multiple careers” (Brown, 2005) myself. I was particularly interested in English and Chinese literature when I was in high school, yet I chose Economics and Foreign Trade major in college. I worked at a foreign company as manager assistant after graduation. Soon after, I came to US to study MBA, and one of my favorite classes turned out to be Management Information Science, so I continued a second master degree in computer science immediately after. Since then, I’ve worked in e-health and higher education industry as software engineer. Bored of writing programs in a lonely cubical, I join PhD in IS program at CGU, looking forward to teaching and researching things that I am interested in. I found myself often benefit from the aforementioned combination of knowledge, skills and experience, such that my research envision has significantly expanded and my analysis ability has also strengthened. For example, in various research projects at the social learning software lab, I applied technology acceptance, user training, and learning theory that I learned from the higher education industry to guide the design product and process of a system. I also applied project management, business strategy skills from MBA classes and business corporations to manage the projects and collaborate with my team members. I also feel comfortable working in cross disciplinary teams that encompass multiple ways of knowing. Amusingly, I often found myself think differently from other colleagues who possess only business or IT background. At the same time, it is easier for me to think in their shoes and assist consolidating different opinions.

Regardless of the aforementioned benefits of being trandisciplinary scholar, many institutions have been slow to recognize and allow for transdisciplinary inquiry (Borderland, 2006) - as Robert Hodge argued in a 1995 issue of the Australian universities review, while more and more postgraduates are pursuing such an approach to their research, they run the risk of being inappropriately supervised and assessed. He makes a passionate argument for students to be bold enough to hold to this approach, and for universities to change their culture to reflect the shift. For Hodge, the transdisciplinary turn is a kind of Kuhnian revolution or, in Foucault’s terms, an ‘epistemic rupture’. It is a question of refusing the way in which disciplines, whilst transmitting useful and important knowledge, also ‘repulse a whole teratology of learning’ - teratology being ‘the study of monsters’.

Hodge exhorts us to be open to the monstrous, to “take seriously those problems, beliefs and experiences that are annulled by a dominant discipline, whether they be intractably personal or contaminated by the disreputable demotic or popular, by passion or anger or delight, by the desire to change the world or to dream a new one.” Being a transdisciplinary scholar then is not to seek refuge in a new mastery but to place oneself, as a site and vector of knowledge, at risk - to seek to become something other than what one is. it might be to seek, as Jane Bennett has argued, productive new hybrids of thought, machine, history and subjectivity.

Here the troubling convergences between mind and body, reason and unreason, man and animal, male and female, self and other are matched by a dissolution of the boundaries which have marked off disciplines from one another and effectively organised powerful systems of learning, pedagogy, research and knowledge. For these reasons, practising transdisciplinary scholarship can itself feel dangerous and troubling, and may produce a certain loneliness. Yet however different, transdisciplinarity is still inspired by the ideals which lie at the root of the liberal tradition, even as it questions its form, limits and history. This is a necessary “postmodern” irony - because while such work criticises and undermines the enlightenment, as a historical experience and a series of claims, it continues to argue within its terms. It asks for free and open debate, democratic spaces of thought, for the university to live up to an ideal it claims to embody. It speaks in the terms of ethics, justice and freedom, even as it rethinks and modifies them.

Agreed with Robert Hodge, I think we should still be aware that it is difficult to become an expertise in another field; sometimes even within one field, each subject can be so deep that it can take years a scholar to master. For example, it may take a database expertise years to master the software development for the DBMS that he has been using. If a scholar doesn’t have enough time or talent in mastering another field or subject, there could be chances that the scholar cannot accurately interpret and/or incorporate other subjects into his own research context, as a result, the study would be misleading to colleagues in same area, and brought critics from the experts from the other field.

Reference:

Bob Hodge (1995), “Monstrous knowledge: Doing PhDs in the new humanities”, Australian Universities’ Review 38 (2)

Borderland eJournal Web Site http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/about/manifesto.html Retrieved September 26th 2006.

John Seely Brown (2005), “New Learning Environment for the 21^st Century”, Presentation at the Forum for the Future of Higher Education’s 2005 Aspen Symposium.

Ben Shneiderman (2003) “Leonardo’s Laptop”, MIT Press.

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