Decentralized platforms and human relationships

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings This research paper concentrates on three design dimensions surrounding the formation of robust platform ecosystems like Uber and Udemy, namely: governance decentralization, shared context, and engagement. All these contribute to embedding trust and connection to a platform, by facilitating human relationships forming through them. Knowledge sharing and collaboration are core facets of building-in ever-increasing layers of innovation, and at one extreme platform governance could be completely decentralized, although this risks destabilizing the benefits of the other facets. Managers can gain plenty of commitment by involving many actors in decisions, without leaving the platform like a ship without a rudder… directionless. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Designing platform ecosystems for collaboration, innovation and growth

PurposeThis paper explores the design dimensions that foster identity construction, legitimation, and growth of digitally mediated platform ecosystems.Design/methodology/approachA midrange theorizing approach was adopted to assimilate and induct the extant literature on ecosystems, platform business models and innovation, yielding testable propositions on ecosystem design for empirical testing.FindingsThe paper suggests that decentralized governance, partner engagement and shared context are three dimensions of criticality for designing a distinct platform ecosystem. These design dimensions nurture interactions, transactions, relationships between platform participants and external actors to make ecosystems authentic and legitimate. Decentralization is relevant for inducing flexibility and autonomy of participants on the platform. Engagement impacts the intensity of relationships the platform has with other firms in the ecosystem, while shared context is essential for creating knowledge and harnessing innovation on the platform.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper identifies a set of three testable propositions on ecosystem design for further empirical analysis by ecosystem researchers.Practical implicationsTo achieve future readiness, organizations must become resilient to the market environment. With that intent, traditional businesses are revising their operating models to become more collaborative, integrative and efficient. Adoption of digital initiatives for redesigning towards platform ecosystems will make traditional models more relevant as markets evolve. But as a new organization form, platform ecosystem faces the challenge of legitimacy. Author suggests that managers use the organization design lever to meet the challenge.Originality/valueEmergence of platform-based businesses and transformation of existing models to platform ecosystems are impacting today's competitive environment. During initial phases of evolution, ecosystems aim for identity and legitimacy. The authors contribute to organizational aspects of the platform ecosystem design literature by identifying decentralization of governance, engagement and shared context as dimensions of criticality for future-ready platforms. Secondly, these dimensions are associated with identity and legitimation of platform ecosystems. Decentralization is relevant for supply-side producers of goods and services on the platform, engagement has impact on both supply and demand-side participants of platforms, and shared context is essential for knowledge creation and harnessing innovation.

STRATEGIES IN CONVEYING INFORMATION ABOUT UNSHARED EVENTS USING AIDED COMMUNICATION

Describing events may be challenging for any child, but children who use communication aids may face unique linguistic, pragmatic, and strategic challenges in conveying information with the communication means they have available. This study explores strategies used by young, aided communicators when describing the content of a video unknown to their communication partners. The participants of the study were 48 aided communicators (aged 5;3–15;2) from nine countries and seven language groups and their communication partners (parents, professionals, and peers) who used natural speech. Descriptive and statistical analyses were utilized to investigate the relationships between individual characteristics, linguistic and non-linguistic factors, linguistic strategies, and performance in conveying the content of the video event. Analyses of the 48 videotaped interactions revealed the use of a variety of linguistic elements and multimodal strategies, demonstrating both creativity and challenges. Success in relaying messages was significantly related to age, mode of communication, and individual profiles, such as everyday communication functioning and comprehension of grammar. Measures of receptive vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning were not significantly related to communicative success. The use of shared context and negotiation of meaning of potentially ambiguous utterances demonstrate the shared responsibility of disambiguation and meaning construction in interactions involving aided and naturally speaking communicators.

Show or Tell? Teaching with language outperforms demonstration but only when context is shared

People use a wide range of communicative acts, from concrete demonstrations to abstract language. What are the strengths and weaknesses of such different modalities? We present a series of real-time, multi-player experiments asking participants to teach (Boolean) concepts using either demonstrations or language. Our first experiment (N = 454) manipulated the complexity of the concept, finding that linguistic (but not demonstrative) teaching enables high-fidelity transmission of more complex concepts. Why, then, do humans use both demonstrations and language? As a form of conventionalized communication, language relies on shared context between speaker and listener, whereas demonstrations are inherently grounded in the world. We hypothesized linguistic communication would be more sensitive to perturbations of shared context than demonstrations. Our second experiment (N = 568) manipulated teachers’ ability to see the features that defined the concept. This restriction severely impaired linguistic (but not demonstrative) teaching. Our comparative approach confirms language relies on shared context to permit high bandwidth communication; in contrast, demonstrations are lower-bandwidth but more robust.

Initial person reference in Providence Island Sign Language

When referring to non-present entities, speakers and signers can select from a range of different strategies to create expressions that range from extremely concise to highly elaborate. This design of referring expressions is based partly on the availability of contextual information that can aid addressee understanding. In the small signing community of Providence Island, signers’ heavy reliance on extra-linguistic information has led to their language being labelled as context-dependent (Washabaugh, de Santis & Woodward 1978). This study investigates the semiotic strategies that deaf signers in Providence Island use to introduce non-present third person referents, and examines how signers optimise specificity and minimise ambiguity by drawing on shared context. We examined first introductions to non-present people in spontaneous dyadic conversations between deaf signers and analysed the semiotic strategies used. We found that signers built referring expressions using the same strategies found in other sign languages, yet designed expressions that made use of contextual knowledge shared through community membership, such as geography, local spoken languages and traits of fellow islanders. Our signers also used strategies described as unusual or unattested in other sign languages, such as unframed constructed action sequences and stand-alone mouthings. This study deepens our understanding of context dependence by providing examples of how context is drawn upon by communities with high degrees of shared knowledge. Our results call into question the classification of sign languages as context-dependent or context-independent and highlights the differences in data collection across communities and the resulting limitations of cross-linguistic comparisons.

Histories of Visual Communication Design

In this article, the history of visual communication design provides an area of thematic convergence. The research represented here engages typographic communication, an area of investigation familiar to the journal's readership. Yet its significance extends beyond illuminating the historical context of singular designs or designers. Collectively, the authors in this issue join a broader and sustained interdisciplinary conversation between design history and visual communication design practice. Situating their research relative to this shared context expands its relevance beyond their discrete areas of focus. At its inception, the history of visual communication design relied on the intuition of practitioners and the connoisseurship of collectors; its narrative prioritized aesthetic styles and eminent designers. The first sustained calls to move beyond such a conceptualization emerged in 1983 at Coming of Age: The First Symposium on the History of Graphic Design.

When Will Robots Be Sentient?

The current failure to construct an artificial intelligence (AI) agent with the capacity for domain-general learning is a major stumbling block in the attempt to build conscious robots. Taking an evolutionary approach, we previously suggested that the emergence of consciousness was entailed by the evolution of an open-ended domain-general form of learning, which we call unlimited associative learning (UAL). Here, we outline the UAL theory and discuss the constraints and affordances that seem necessary for constructing an AI machine exhibiting UAL. We argue that a machine that is capable of domain-general learning requires the dynamics of a UAL architecture and that a UAL architecture requires, in turn, that the machine is highly sensitive to the environment and has an ultimate value (like self-persistence) that provides shared context to all its behaviors and learning outputs. The implementation of UAL in a machine may require that it is made of “soft” materials, which are sensitive to a large range of environmental conditions, and that it undergoes sequential morphological and behavioral co-development. We suggest that the implementation of these requirements in a human-made robot will lead to its ability to perform domain-general learning and will bring us closer to the construction of a sentient machine.

Duelling contexts: how action misalignment leads to impoliteness in a courtroom

This paper investigates linguistic and non-linguistic markers of negative evaluations of situated behaviours, termed impoliteness (Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. In Drew Paul, Marjorie H. Goodwin, John J. Gumpertz & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Studies in interactional linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The paper takes an interactional pragmatic approach to a fixed institutional setting (a courtroom) to investigate how (not why) a series of reprimands and sanctions unfolded. It shows that the key participants, the judge and the defendant, orient to separate interactional cues from their unshared overhearing audiences (their unshared contexts), whilst orienting to each other’s institutional interaction turns (their shared context). This paper suggests that their contexts create competing architectures of intersubjectivity, termed duelling contexts, because the participants are not co-locative (in separate rooms connected through closed circuit TV).

Trust in Artificial Intelligence: Meta-Analytic Findings

Objective The present meta-analysis sought to determine significant factors that predict trust in artificial intelligence (AI). Such factors were divided into those relating to (a) the human trustor, (b) the AI trustee, and (c) the shared context of their interaction. Background There are many factors influencing trust in robots, automation, and technology in general, and there have been several meta-analytic attempts to understand the antecedents of trust in these areas. However, no targeted meta-analysis has been performed examining the antecedents of trust in AI. Method Data from 65 articles examined the three predicted categories, as well as the subcategories of human characteristics and abilities, AI performance and attributes, and contextual tasking. Lastly, four common uses for AI (i.e., chatbots, robots, automated vehicles, and nonembodied, plain algorithms) were examined as further potential moderating factors. Results Results showed that all of the examined categories were significant predictors of trust in AI as well as many individual antecedents such as AI reliability and anthropomorphism, among many others. Conclusion Overall, the results of this meta-analysis determined several factors that influence trust, including some that have no bearing on AI performance. Additionally, we highlight the areas where there is currently no empirical research. Application Findings from this analysis will allow designers to build systems that elicit higher or lower levels of trust, as they require.