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This paper presents findings from a scoping study conducted with 12 participants who use cloud productivity tools in a range of small business contexts and work arrangements. There are two key areas discussed in this paper; access and equity issues withing different Australian geographic regions and polarized views of cloud technology that resonate with teleworking utopian/dystopian discourses.

The aim of this book is to provide a current account of the commitments and contributions of research and practice in the Participatory Design of information technologies. An overview of the central concepts that have defined and shaped the field is provided as an introduction to the more detailed focus of later chapters.

This chapter explores a range of different approaches to ethics and their relevance to Participatory Design as background to the ethical issues of designing with users. The discussion highlights the strong connections between ethical practices in design, the inclusiveness of the design processes, the choice of design methods and the responsibilities and accountabilities of those participating. The chapter calls for increased attention to the ways that design is completed in use and for new and extended Participatory Design methods and tools to better forsee and imagine ethical issues that might arise in the use of future technologies.

This paper introduces a large research project that investigates the remarking of professional practices in new models of primary health care. One strand of the research explores the roles of information and communication technologies in practice change. The project involves long-term ethnographic engagement in two sites that are part of an Australian primary healthcare change initiative.

Drawing from the work of Merleau-Ponty, this paper takes some initial steps towards a phenomenological account of the specificities of ageing bodies and the consequent implications for both policy development and the potential contributions of social and tangible technologies. Ageing bodies have been in the making for many years, long enough for their various individual genetic and environmental influences to have expressed themselves, intertwined with the inscriptions made on them by actual life experiences, such as the work they did, how well they have been looked after and various random life events and accidents. A phenomenological account enables us to understand the opportunities and constraints our embodied histories provide for the appropriation of new technologies according to the social and cultural worlds they enable us to inhabit. This would suggest approaches to both design and policy making that prioritise the flexible use of new technologies that are configurable by and to the diverse and specific capacities of the actual bodies of ageing people.

This paper is about new forms of participation that are enabled as a result of social technologies. The premise is that social technologies simultaneously create and demand an engagement with the dynamic relations of design and use and that this gives rise to new forms of participation 'in the wild'. Our aim is to contribute to understandings and practices of participatory design in this emerging context. Underpinning our research is a question of how the understandings of, and commitment to, participation represented by Participatory Design intersect with the notion of participation as a broader cultural phenomenon. Using examples from recent practice-led research we reflect on the potential conditions for participation in early design that social technologies represent, the role of social technologies in enabling these experiences, and the challenges we have faced in embracing such participatory approaches in commercial contexts.

This paper reflects on the changing nature of participation and design in the context of social technologies and, in particular, our evolving understanding of what it means to do design. When designing social technologies we are effectively creating containers or scaffolds; their shape is formed through participation and user driven contributions and that shape changes over time. In designing successful social platforms around which communities grow, evolve and share, our role as designers extends beyond researching, defining, creating and releasing a product. The facilitation of participation by the âfuture communityâ also becomes a central concern. In this paper we present, explore and reflect upon the notion of seeding as a useful concept for approaching the facilitation of participation in social technologies. Seeding is concerned with the process of embedding and connecting design within the real world. It draws our attention to the work that needs to be done for design to become part of peopleâs everyday lives, and our role as designers in creating conditions under which this is likely to occur. The theoretical reflections and arguments presented in the paper are based on empirical research into the impact of social technologies on exploratory design research methods used in the early stages of a design project. We present potential strategies for seeding early in the design process that emerged from our research and reflect on the questions about participation, protocol and practice that they raise.

We present analytic concepts that emerged from field studies of the everyday practices of Film and Television Freelancers. We categorised the freelancers mobile practices into two dimensions: the interplay of flux and stability, and the interplay of the macro and the micro. These dimensions emphasised two key practices that the freelancers engaged in while using technologies to manage change in their lives: sustaining and transitioning practices. These concepts structure our findings in a way that may provide technology designers and researchers with a useful conceptual tool. These concepts draw attention to two aspects that have been little explored in the literature on understanding mobile practices. Firstly, the everyday uses of technologies to manage transitions between longer term durations of practices. Secondly, the integral role of stable contexts, beyond remote work spaces alone, for supporting and shaping mobile practices.

The emphasis on participation in social technologies challenges some of our traditional assumptions about the role of users and designers in design. It also exposes some of the limitations and assumptions about design embedded in our traditional models and methods. Based on a review of emerging practice we present four perspectives on design in the context of social technologies. By presenting this âlay of the landâ, we seek to contribute to ongoing work on the nature of participation and design in the context of social technologies. We draw particular attention to the ways in which roles and responsibilities in design are being reassigned and redistributed. As traditional boundaries between design and use and designer and user dissolve, design is becoming more public. In the context of social technologies design is moving out into the wild.

Interactive systems such as community blogs and online campaign sites that require, expect or anticipate user contributions, can be conceptualised as containers, or spaces for interaction. Digital Eskimo is a design agency responsible for creating such online social spaces. In this case study we outline how we have adapted the design research method we call Mobile Diaries into Digital Eskimo's process for the design of community, campaigning and content-sharing based sites. We describe the development of the method, and evaluate its contribution to our design process and suitability for use in the design of social systems in particular. As such the solution that we have developed and documented in this case study is a methodological one.

This paper presents thoughts to extend our understanding of bodily aspects of technology interactions. The aim of the paper is to offer a way of looking at the role our kinaesthetic sense plays in human-computer interaction. We approach this issue by framing it around how our bodies establish relationships with things when interacting with technology. Five aspects of a conceptual tool, body-thing dialogue, potential for action, withinreach, out-of-reach and movement expression are introduced. We discuss the role this tool can play in our thinking about, further exploration and eventually our design for movement enabled technology interactions. The idea is that it can help us consider, not just how a design or a technology might look but also how it might feel to use.

This position statement describes a method called "Experience Workshops", developed by the authors for working with expert audiences in the design of an interactive artwork. Based around the participants' experience of a high-fidelity prototype, the workshop aims to generate experiential language. draw together the artist's goals and the participants' experiential actualities and provide a way to reflect together on the gaps and connections between them. We describe the research principles and needs which led to the development of the method and the models it draws from. We show how the method has been used, and reflect upon its effectiveness.

This study addresses everyday human practices in order to inform our thinking around the design of technology to support human mobility and mobile device use. Building on traditional ethnographic techniques, we investigated the contents of people's bags, seeking traces of planning, decision making and other social practices that people rely on to construct and maintain relations between particular mobile objects and their particular mobile lives. The research contributes to the development of novel methods for researching mobile practices and its initial findings question assumptions about information use and storage, and about the personalisation of mobile device and services.

Written texts are more and more consumed in a multitude of different environments and media: on screens or device displays, at home, in offices or in public spaces, in quiet, private places or in noisy surroundings; mediated by new technologies such as mobile phones or personal digital assistants. This paper traces the development of typography from Gutenberg's invention of movable type to today's dynamic moving texts. It proposes and explores the argument that the typographic landscape we engage with is experienced rather than read. From the Crystal Goblet approach in typography to the often playful interactions with type in new media, a 'new reader' emerges, who is at the same time reader in a classic sense but also viewer of a typographic performance and and finally user or even creator (see Apple's 'LiveType' for instance) of technological mediated typography.

This paper presents use scenarios, derived from user-centred design research and practice, as a useful tool for representing the user in the design of mBusiness technologies. Use scenarios are increasingly being employed as a method for addressing issues

The relations between various computer applications and the social and organisational behaviour they are intended to support are not natural or pregiven. They are always constructed and always the result of decisions made somewhere. This paper takes a fragment of shared design work and considers some solutions to one of the technical problems that arise when technology is used to support similar work over distance. The argument is made that some of these solutions are better than others because they enable human interaction in different ways. Some solutions enhance the possibilities for human agency, others diminish it. Since human agency is about capacities and powers to act in specific situations, and ethics is about action, then there are ethical issues associated with the particular solutions to technical problems, as well as the particular representations of human activities, that we choose to embed in the technology we build.