Growing Pains

Today's ever-changing business environment is very demanding for companies, particularly those of modest dimensions and operating in more traditional formats. There is an imperative change happening in market and consumer behavior – a need for digital transformation or digital complement to the traditional business model, aiming at improving the lives of individuals, groups, and society as a whole. A Portuguese small company that manufactures cookies and biscuits has identified a need to move forward and revitalize its traditional business format, preserving its traditional origins but seeking to reframe its business in a more digital context. The main goals of the case study are to understand (1) this brand's evolution, (2) its primary difficulties, and (3) strengths, and the authors also indicate possible future paths that can be replicated in other similar businesses.

A Review of Digital Health Design Approaches: Challenges Towards Real World Implementation (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Digital health represents an important strategy in the future of healthcare delivery. Over the past decade, mHealth has accelerated the agency of healthcare users. Despite prevailing excitement about the potential of digital health, questions remain on efficacy, uptake, usability and patience outcome. This challenge is confounded by two industries, DIGITAL and HEALTH, that have vastly different approaches to research, design, testing and implementation. In this regard, there is a need to examine prevailing design approaches, to weigh their benefits and challenges towards implementation, and to recommend a path forward that synthesises the needs of this complex stakeholder group. OBJECTIVE This review studies prominent digital health intervention (DHI) design approaches mediating the digital health space. In doing so, we seek to examine each methodology’s: origins, perceived benefits, contrasting nuances, challenges, and typical use-case scenarios. METHODS A narrative synthesis approach to literature review was employed to review existing evidence. We searched indexed scientific literature using keywords relative to different digital health intervention designs. Papers selected after screening were those that discussed the design and implementation of digital health design approaches. RESULTS 120 papers on intervention design were selected for full-text review. We selected the 20 most prominent papers on each design approach, synthesizing findings under the categories of origins, advantages, disadvantages, challenges and cases. CONCLUSIONS Digital health is experiencing the growing pains of rapid expansion. Currently, numerous design approaches are being implemented in order to harmonise the needs of a complex stakeholder group. Whether the primary stakeholder is positioned as the end-user/person/human/patient, the challenge to synthesise the constraints and affordances of both digital design and healthcare, built equally around user satisfaction and clinically efficacy remains paramount. Further research that works towards a transdisciplinarity in digital health may help to break down friction in this field. Until digital health is viewed as a hybridised industry with unique requirements rather than competing interests, the nuances that each design approach posits will be difficult to realise in a real world context. We encourage the collaboration of digital and health experts within hybrid design teams, through all stages of intervention design, in order to create a better digital health culture and design ethos.

Qualitative Research and Case Studies in Public Administration

Public administration has experienced academic growing pains and longstanding debates related to its identity as a social and administrative science. The field’s evolution toward a narrow definition of empiricism through quantitative measurement has limited knowledge cumulation. Because the goal of all scientific endeavors is to advance by building upon and aggregating knowledge across studies, a field-level point of view eschewing traditional dichotomies such as qualitative/quantitative debates in favor of methodological pluralism allows for examination of both the art and science of public administration. To accomplish this, traditional notions of quality, namely rigor, must be reconceptualized in a way that is appropriate for the philosophical commitments of a selected methodology. Rigor should focus on the accuracy, exhaustiveness, and systematicity of data collection and analysis. This allows for quality judgments about the degree to which the methods resulted in evidence that addresses the research questions and supports stated conclusions. This is a much broader approach to rigor that addresses multiple types of inquiry and knowledge creation. Once the question of rigor is not limiting the types of research done in the field, attention can be turned to the ways in which high-quality studies can contribute to knowledge cumulation. Case studies can be used as an example of a field-level point of view, as they have the ability to utilize abductive reasoning to consider both the whole (the entire case) and the particular (factors that contribute to outcomes, processes, or theories). Case studies explore the relationship between context-independent theories and context-dependent factors using different types of data collection and analysis: a triangulation of sorts. They can test theories in multiple ways and create or suggest new theories. Considering field-level questions as a case study and synthesizing findings from multiple related studies, regardless of methodology, can help move the field forward in terms of its connection between theory and practice, art and science.

Why Zoom Is Not Doomed Yet: Privacy and Security Crisis Response in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic brought Zoom explosive growth and a major privacy and security crisis in March 2020. This research advances a producer’s perspective that directs attentions to institutional and organizational actors and draws on theories of privacy management and organizational crisis communication to examine Zoom’s response to its privacy and security crisis. We primarily use data from 14 weekly Ask Eric Anything webinars from April 8 to July 15, 2020 to illustrate the strategies of Zoom’s crisis response, especially organizational representation, the contours of its analytic account acknowledging and reducing responsibility, and patterns of corrective and preventive action for user education and product improvement. Results demonstrate the usefulness of the producer’s perspective and shed light on how Zoom navigated the privacy and security crisis through mobilizing networks of executives, advisors, consultants, and clients for expertise, endorsement, and collaboration. Moreover, its response strategies have built on and contributed to Zoom’s organizational mission and culture, reframing the crisis as a growth opportunity for prioritizing privacy and security rather than mere growing pains. Zoom’s nimble, reasonable, collaborative, interactive and curated organizational response to its privacy and security crisis as an unintended consequence of its sudden rise to prominence amid a global pandemic offers a useful model for tech firms’ crisis response at a crucial moment for the tech industry around the world. Implications are relevant to understanding the socio-technical and economic consequences of this ongoing global pandemic.

The Pandemic and This Issue of Design Education

When we first initiated a call for this issue on design education, never could we have imagined or foreseen what lay ahead. Since late 2019, Hong Kong has gone through an enormously difficult time. First, spikes of social unrest, rapidly followed by COVID-19. Half of the first semester of the 2019 – 2020 academic year, as skirmishes closed in on The Hong Kong Polytechnic University campus, all courses had to move over to available and often misunderstood online platforms. As the situation finally subsided, the virus emerged, impacting the commencement of the second semester, and the overall delivery modes of a structured curriculum for an entire year. Both faculty and students of the School of Design lived and worked in high hopes to return to faceto- face teaching sooner, rather than later. In time, hope conceded to a stark reality that online, the virtual and the digital models of education, have moved into focus as the main and primary modes of education. Long gone are the days of the digital as a mere supplemental or peripheral possibility. The digital reality presented other challenges to design education: ensuring credible and authentic outcomes for each of the design disciplines within a non-studio setting, the expression of ideas, or demonstrating principles across and through digital platforms with the additional burdens of a digital generation that instantaneously become camera shy. Or, in the extreme the mistrust shown by students that reviewers may not understand the design work without a physical presence. Moving one year forward, the growing pains of digital pedagogies has caused an instantaneous maturing of educators, those being educated, and of what is said, shown and discussed. Somehow, the global body of design environments have collectively responded to these and more local challenges, yet again transforming the specifics of digital pedagogies across unexplored territories. The following series of images attest to the resilience of digital pedagogies and design institutions. May this stand as a testament to rapid responses, individuals who took the reins, and how educators shape the future of design, design-research and ultimately how design is carried forward across generations.