Dissertations and Theses
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Mobile hybridity: supporting personal and romantic relationships with mobile phones in digitally emergent spaces
(2007)Mobile phones are a global phenomenon and can be readily found in places as technologically disparate as Japan and sub-Saharan Africa. Their sociological impact in these diverse cultural and technological contexts is rich ... -
QuikScan: Facilitating Document Use Through Innovative Formatting
(2008)Reading and seeking information in documents are among the crucial literacies of our time. Our ability to carry out these activities successfully is due to a long series of innovations in information design that go back ... -
Indicating Impact: The Environmental Life-Cycle Rating Label
(IEEE International Professional Communication Conference, 2011)Point-of-purchase environmental labeling can complement governmental environmental regulation by enabling consumers to address environmental problems via their purchasing power. Environmental labels can also provide ... -
Bridging the gap between user experience research and design in industry: An analysis of two common communication tools: Personas and scenarios
(2010-04-29)User experience (UX) research in the design of technology products utilizes human-centered design (HCD) methods to summarize and explain pertinent information about end users to designers. However, UX researchers cannot ... -
“Getting on the same page”: Negotiation and intellectual collaboration in student research groups
(2010-12-30)There is a growing interest in what constitutes effective practice in faculty-led research based learning experiences that involve students learning research by doing research. There is a particular need for research-based ... -
Transitioning Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Projects from Research to Implementation
(2011-08-03)Since international development emerged at the end of World War II, people have had high expectations that technology and information would play a central role in improving the lives of people in resource-constrained ... -
Investigating Resource-Constrained Populations: Developing Design Approaches to Support Agency and Reciprocity
(2011-06-01)Designing for information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing countries and for poor communities in developed countries presents unique challenges. In these settings, people have limited access to a variety ... -
The Effect of Linguistic Explicitness and English Language Proficiency on the Credibility of Online Medical Information
(2011-12-06)Perceived credibility is important to consumers of online medical information because it frequently forms the basis for making treatment choices. While credibility is important to users around the globe, most medical Web ... -
Software and Space: Investigating How a Cosmology Research Group Enacts Infrastructure by Producing Software
Software is a pervasive element of twenty-first century life and an integral element of scientific research. Research in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in recent decades investigates how distributed, collaborative ... -
Knowledge Workers and Associative Activity: An Examination of Knowledge Work Systems and Settings
The US has experienced broad reaching economic changes as work has moved from the farm, to the factory, to the office, and now beyond. The long-term, high-level shift toward information work in the US is accompanied by ... -
An Analysis of Game-Based Learning for the Design of Digital Science Games
As science becomes increasingly data-driven, there is a need to prepare the next generation of youth with the wide variety of skills and tools necessary for future scientific careers. In this dissertation, I address the ... -
Coordination in Commons-Based Peer Production Communities: Evaluation, Analysis, and Design for Emergent Systems
Traditional organizations are often relatively structured, involving hierarchies of individual agents driving progress through production, with well-defined boundaries between internal requirements and external expectations ... -
Human Centered Tools for Analyzing Online Social Data
In the social sciences, researchers are increasingly turning to datasets collected from social media, online chat, forums, and email to address questions about human communication and behavior. However, these datasets are ... -
The Effect of Visual Design and Information Content on Readers’ Assessments of API Reference Topics
Software developers must learn and use an increasing number of application-programming interfaces (APIs) to create applications and web sites. To apply these APIs in the increasingly short development time that modern ... -
Coordinating the Commons: Diversity & Dynamics in Open Collaborations
(2014-02-24)The success of Wikipedia demonstrates that open collaboration can be an effective model for organizing geographically-distributed volunteers to perform complex, sustained work at a massive scale. However, Wikipedia's history ... -
Conceptions of Trust: How Designers Approach Usable Privacy and Security
(2013-11-14)Designers who create user interfaces are frequently required to ask users for personal information. For the user, this is a "trust question": Do I, the user, trust the system or entity that is asking me for this information? ... -
Understanding University Students' Use of Tools and Artifacts in Support of Collaborative Project Work
(2013-07-23)When designers collaborate on projects, they use an assortment of tools to generate a variety of artifacts that help them complete their work. However, it remains unclear how university students use tools and create artifacts ... -
Engineering Student Development: Supporting Self-Authoring Engineers
(2013-07-23)In this study, engineering undergraduate students constructed a preparedness portfolio in a portfolio studio--the pedagogy at the center of this study. To explore and understand this pedagogy, the construct of self-authorship ... -
Promoting Rhetorical Awareness and Perceived Self-Efficacy: Engineering Undergraduate Students Creating Preparedness Portfolios About Communication
(2013-07-23)Effective communication has been identified in recent years as a crucial competency for practicing engineers by industry professionals, educators, engineering graduates working in the field, and current engineering ... -
"Greater than the Sum of its Parts:" Coordinating Centers as Facilitators of Network-Level Work in Cancer Epidemiology Coordinating Center Enabled Networks
(2013-07-23)As collaborative research has increased in size and scope, the overhead of managing such large endeavors has also increased. In cancer epidemiology, one tool used to address the challenges of working on multi-institutional ...