A Roadmap for Developing Computer-Mediated Solutions for Situated Workforce Learning

With perceptual capabilities, computers can intelligently function as a part of our everyday lives, helping us to make sense of what is happening and joining in with us as we experience and navigate through many different types of situations. In this way, computing systems can be situated when they combine machine perception with background knowledge to observe, explore, and interpret human and environmental activity in a way that supports decision making. Many of the current, prominent situated computing solutions are consumer-focused in nature. But these systems will, in time, change the way we work as well as how we learn. Many disciplines are adapting and changing in the process, and many opportunities remain, including the use of situated computing systems for workforce education. There are many opportunities to innovate and improve workforce education by leveraging the power and affordances of mobile-device technology to turn everyday situations into everyday learning opportunities.

Bare Nothingness

This chapter examines the current state of digital artworks, arguing that they have not yet made a groundbreaking impact on the cultural landscape of the early 21st century and suggesting that a reason for this lack of notoriety is the obsolete model of agency deployed by many digital artists. As an alternative to what is framed as out-of-date forms of interactivity, the chapter highlights evolving research into interactive systems, artists' tools, applications, and techniques that will provide readers with an insightful and up-to-date examination of emerging multimedia technology trends. In particular, the chapter looks at situated computing and embodied systems, in which context-aware models of human subjects can be combined with sensor technology to expand the agencies at play in interactive works. The chapter connects these technologies to Big Data, Crowdsourcing and other techniques from artificial intelligence that expand our understanding of interaction and participation.

La lezione di Steve Jobs: una riflessione italiana

In this paper we discuss the lesson that the legacy of Steve Jobs as an entrepreneur leaves to us, with a particular attention to what we, in Italy, can learn from it. Three are the issues we take into consideration: innovation, organization and sustainability. With respect to the first of them, we compare the way Apple has created its innovative products with the innovation done by other companies like Google and Facebook, to argue that Jobs was practicing at a very high quality level interaction design. With respect to organization, we stress that Jobs has paid great attention to the creation of durable company and we suggest a parallel between him and Adriano Olivetti. Finally, we show that sustainability has been considered as important, but after the quality of products. We conclude the paper with two provoking claims: first, we claim that Apple can be considered as a representative of the Italian Way of Doing Industry; second, we suggest a new perspective to create innovative applications of ICT, beyond Apple, called situated computing.