Conference Agenda

While the design of user interfaces is a field driven by people of Western origin and culture, most users of IT tools come from much more diverse backgrounds and cultures. This gap can give rise to ergonomic problems in the way interfaces are used. Therefore, numerous studies have highlighted a definite interest in designing a user interface adapted to the specificities of users in low-income countries. Among other things, these specificities are low literacy rates or the high prevalence of local languages. However, while the field of interface design adapted for users in low-income countries has been extensively studied, few studies exist regarding the methodologies behind designing interfaces for low-income contexts, despite the acknowledgment of their potential value. This paper introduces a transdisciplinary framework that strongly focuses on the culture of the end-user and considers the physical and cultural distance, which can be very high, between the persons who develop the product and the target users. The related methodology has been built from learnings gathered by analyzing 173 papers on user computer interface literature for low-income countries. The proposed methodology is highly iterative and allows a thorough study of the culture of the end user before diving into the design work, per se. This proposed methodology will be applied to a money transfer application in Senegal to validate its relevance.

This paper addresses why empathy, as a transdisciplinary engineering methodology, is key to understanding people's readiness to adopt a new technology.

The empathy-led methodology collects scenario-based data on users' perceptions of technology's usefulness and the feelings they attach to it in the pre-adoption stage. The paper highlights the pilot study, which applied the transdisciplinary methodology to implement Building Information Modelling in Architecture and Construction firms. The paper highlights the usefulness, applicability, and impact of the empathy-led methodology in identifying individual psychological, emotional, and intrinsic variables that are usually difficult to capture through methods common in engineering and science. The paper concludes with the key emotional variables identified by this methodology paving the way towards a people-led approach to understanding digital adoption for organisations to create a ‘happy and sustainable workforce’.

Funded by InterAct, the project comprises the disciplines of Design, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering. Design is the integrator-connector in this collaboration, bringing different disciplinary thinking and practices together.

This systematic literature review (SLR) explores existing and newly emergent ethical and legal challenges associated with the use of AI and robotics in armed conflicts. We conducted an extensive review of relevant scholarly publications associated with (lethal) autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). Besides the ethical and legal principles, we also explore emergent technical applications associated with these technologies in armed conflict(s). Our particular focus is to compare literature from the last 12 years with publications since the outbreaks of recent armed conflicts from the perspective of LAWS. We engage in exploring and identifying the shifts in ethical arguments and discourse, as well as shifts in policy subject themes, and standards setting around the use of emergent technology in relation with AI and robotics. Our contribution analyses emergent socio-technical themes and arguments relevant for engineers, policy-makers, and other interdisciplinary scholars across a variety of disciplines.

A number of basic foundational concepts are presented in order to help develop a clearer idea of what Transdisciplinary Engineering is from a theoretical perspective, including: 1) a Transdisciplinary Architectural Framework (TAF), 2) founding Trandisciplinarity Principles (TPs), 3) a Transdisciplinary Knowledge Ontology (TKO), 4) Transdisciplinary Process Integration (TPI), and 5) analysis and the Transdisciplinarity Index (TI). A case study is presented that addresses the sustainability analysis associated with the design and characterization of airports, this being highly transdisciplinary in nature. This involved a number of core elements in the valuation and allocation of associated Key Performance Indicators, including green marketing and carbon foot-printing, as well as action characteristics that present the basis for a ‘Strategic Action Selection process framework’. The relevance of the Transdisciplinary theory is therefore tested against a real-world case study/application in order to test both the consistency and usefulness of such a conceptualization of the tenements of Transdisciplinarity and ultimately, is used to determine a number innovative sustainable design actions and implementations