Digital Retail and How Customer-Centric Technology is Reshaping the Industry

This chapter explains the digital disruption that has occurred and is still happening in the retail industry. It explains the relative positions of the world's leading retailers Wal-Mart, Amazon and Alibaba and the business models of the two top online competitors. It focuses on the impact of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) technologies and new retail trends enabled or boosted by technology such as omni-channel, customer experience, internet of things (IoT) and analytics, fulfillment and delivery. It deepens into IT and business model customer-centric design, the role of the customer and the store in the new digital retail and finishes with an assessment of ROI in retail digitization. The chapter concludes the fundamental IT-enabled changes of digital disruption are critical for all players, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, pure online players and those with both an online and an offline presence.

New and Strange Sorts of Texts

Dennis Baron (1999) writes about the impact of digital technology on literacy practices and thus is a good exemplar for considering how communication technologies are changing the ways in which stories are told. In this chapter, we argue that young adult literature authors and readers are currently in what Baron terms an inventive stage as they devise new ways of producing storied texts. Young adult authors, aware of their readers as avid, exploring, and savvy tech users, experiment with text formats to appeal to readers growing up in a digital “participatory culture” (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton & Robins, 2009). In a cultural climate where the very notion of what constitutes a book is changing, our chapter responds to Baron's (2009) claim that readers and writers are in the process of “[learning] to trust a new technology and the new and strange sorts of texts that it produces” (p. x).

Economic Impact of Digital Media

Digitization by computers, like steam power and internal combustion, is widely recognized as a pervasive, disruptive engine powering new ways of living and affecting all aspects of economic life. Research on its economic impact cannot be entirely disentangled from powerful cultural stories connecting technological, educational, and economic progress. As cracks appear in the narratives of constant progress through technology, science, civilization, and economic prosperity, research on the economic impact of digital media develops nuance. This review of literature examines a wide range of perspectives on the economic impact of digital media as a basis for suggesting areas of further research and implications for education, civic, engagement, and policy.

Applying Digital Storytelling to Business Planning

Digital storytelling for business planning has two different modes of perception, thinking, and communication: the narrative and the logical scientific. This chapter pointed out how the structure and the contents of the digital storytelling work influence its effectiveness through examination of works and the audience's evaluation of the works. Critical points regarding the structure of work were the consistency and the balance. The most important link was from a contrast between the initial situation and obstruction in the narrative part, to key success factors deriving in the analytical part. The link represents what is the problem that the storyteller found. Regarding the contents of work, familiarity to the audience—a story of “something like you”—is effective in understanding, persuasiveness and empathy of the story's message.

Agent-Based Modelling of Emotional Goals in Digital Media Design Projects

The authors promote agent-oriented models to identify, represent and evaluate high-level abstractions of digital media design projects. A major aspect is the introduction of emotional goals, in addition to functional goals and quality goals to describe feelings such as having fun, being engaged and feeling cared for. To establish emotional goals, digital media design methods and processes were employed including the development of emotional scripts, user profiles, mood boards and following an iterative participatory design process. This approach proved to be highly successful, not only to represent emotional goals such as fun, tension and empathy, but also to facilitate the ideation, creation and progressive evaluation of projects. The process supports communication between designers, developers and other stakeholders in large multidisciplinary development teams by providing a shared language and common artefact. The process is demonstrated in the development of a Multiplayer Online Role Play Game (MORPG) called Aspergion that promotes respect for people with Asperger's Syndrome.

Quality of Experience Factors for Mobile TV Users

This chapter helps the professionals involved in the Mobile TV industry to methodically engineer the Quality of Experience (QoE) of Mobile TV users. Its objective is to investigate the factors that influence the QoE of Mobile TV users. It also discusses the issues for strategic implications for the Mobile TV industry. We retrieved and categorized the majority of the critical works focusing on QoE for Mobile TV users. Then, we considered them and proposed a comprehensive road-map for improving the QoE of Mobile TV users. We present an approach to produce improvements to the Mobile TV customer experiences. This chapter proposes a seven-stage “road-map” to improvement, which develops the existing models. This study remains to be seen how the presented QoE factors– both amongst technologies and Mobile TV actors – will affect the potential for Mobile TV amongst various types of users. The proposed road-map can help to bridge gaps between other studies that have either focused on QoE for mobile TV or have addressed frameworks for mobile TV.

Serendipity on a Plate

This article will present and discuss the design thinking, methods, processes and some examples of work that demonstrates how, together with different co-creators, one sets up a work practice using digital 3d objects and images. That in different ways and formats helps us to explore how a database, a set of rules can be used in a dialogue with artistic work practice and how such a process can be used to create images and animation in a variety of design and art projects. The main example is a project called Conversation China that still is in its making, here one works with rather complex processes, involving several digital analogue techniques as the basis for creating the images for a 150 pieces porcelain dinner set. The author's interest in this work is how the intention of the artist or designer is transferred and later embedded in the procedural or algorithmic process and how this intent is organized and set up to secure an desired outcome, mixing the possibilities of the digital media object with manual editing and artistic craftsmanship. What this article tries to put forward is how we designed and set up environments for working with non linear and procedural media, their different expressions and forms by using explorable prototypes and design thinking?

Cognitive Approach to Improve Media Literacy

This chapter starts with an exploration of the media literacy literature and its place in the developing 21st century. The literature suggests that media literacy should be considered as one of the capstones for the skills needed for the 21st century citizens. In terms of developing media literacy skills, scholars look at the concept from either cognitive or social perspective, and the review reveals that both of them are closely related to each other. Moreover, the study asserts that cognitive and metacognitive skills play a significant role in developing the media literacy and the skills for 21st century. Then, the chapter presents a city-wide activity done in Bayburt, Turkey. It is our assumption that the case presented here may be an inspiring example for whom may want to explore different approaches.

Information Overload as a Challenge and Changing Point for Educational Media Literacies

This article deals with the concept of information overload as a crucial element of the changing information environment. Against this background, the authors discuss an alternative process for the conceptualisation of educational media literacy. By combining two nationally-based concepts on media literacy (German and Anglo-American), the yield of such a transnational approach will be demonstrated. The first section is dedicated to a historical overview. Based on the observation that humanity is currently dealing and always has dealt with information overload, leads to the necessity of coping with said overload. To this end, the second section will present and didactically reduce both discourses to their essentials. The third section provides a possible conceptualisation of both concepts and practical application of the combined approach for scholastic learning. The aim of this paper is to stimulate an international exchange on media literacy.

Terms of the Digital Age

This chapter defines terms of the digital age as they relate to digital media literacy. The changing landscape of society is demonstrated through the recalibration occurring in media processes and the cultural forms they generate. These conditions have fostered cultural paradigms unique to the digital age: paradigms aligned with either humanistic or capitalist perspectives, and marketing playing a role with respect to this tension. An analysis of two policies in the form of new curricula reveals that more must be done to prepare, protect, and empower a digitally literate citizenry. The chapter closes with an argument that the first step in this direction must involve both establishing digital media literacy as a discipline as well as deepening and extending current media literacy frameworks.