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Towards a Digital Health Ecology : NHS Digital Adoption through the COVID-19 Looking Glass is about technology adoption in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) as told from the inflection point of a disaster. In 2020 the world lived through a disaster of epic proportions, devastating humanity around the globe. It took a microscopic virus to wreak havoc on our healthcare system and force the adoption of technology in a way that had never been seen before. This book tells the story of digital technology take-up in the NHS through the lens of that disaster. This book documents use of technology in the NHS through the lens of the first pandemic shock. Our healthcare system, paid for by general taxation and free at the point of demand, was conceived and developed in a firmly analogue world. Created in 1948, the NHS predates the invention of the World Wide Web by some forty years. This is not a book simply about technology, it is a study of the painful process of reengineering a mammoth and byzantine system that was built for a different era. The digital health sector is a microcosm of the wider healthcare system, through which grand themes of social inequality, public trust, private versus commercial interests, values and beliefs are played out. The sector is a clash of competing discourses: the civic and doing good for society; the market and wealth creation; the industrial creating more efficient and effective systems; the project expressed as innovation and experimentation; lastly the notion of vitality and leading a happier, healthy life. Each of these discourses exists in a state of flux and tension with the other. This book is offered as a critique of the role of digital technologies within healthcare. It is an examination of competing interests, approaches, and ideologies. It is a story of system complexity told through analysis and personal stories.
This book presents a contextual approach to designing contemporary interactive mobile computer systems as integral parts of ubiquitous computing environments. Interactive mobile systems, services, and devices have become functional design objects that we care deeply about. Although their look, feel, and features impact our everyday lives as we orchestrate them in concert with a plethora of other computing technologies, these artifacts are not well understood or created through traditional methods of user-centered design and usability engineering. Contrary to more traditional IT artifacts, they constitute holistic user experiences of value and pleasure that require careful attention to the variety, complexity, and dynamics of their usage. Hence, the design of mobile interactions proposed in this book transcends existing approaches by using the ensemble of form and context as its central unit of analysis. As such, it promotes a designerly way of achieving convergence between form and context through a contextually grounded, wholeness sensitive, and continually unfolding process of design.
Roadmap to Successful Digital Health Ecosystems: A Global Perspective presents evidence-based solutions found on adopting open platforms, standard information models, technology neutral data repositories, and computable clinical data and knowledge (ontologies, terminologies, content models, process models, and guidelines), resulting in improved patient, organizational, and global health outcomes. The book helps engaging countries and stakeholders take action and commit to a digital health strategy, create a global environment and processes that will facilitate and induce collaboration, develop processes for monitoring and evaluating national digital health strategies, and enable learnings to be shared in support of WHO’s global strategy for digital health. The book explains different perspectives and local environments for digital health implementation, including data/information and technology governance, secondary data use, need for effective data interpretation, costly adverse events, models of care, HR management, workforce planning, system connectivity, data sharing and linking, small and big data, change management, and future vision. All proposed solutions are based on real-world scientific, social, and political evidence. Provides a roadmap, based on examples already in place, to develop and implement digital health systems on a large-scale that are easily reproducible in different environments Addresses World Health Organization (WHO)-identified research gaps associated with the feasibility and effectiveness of various digital health interventions Helps readers improve future decision-making within a digital environment by detailing insights into the complexities of the health system Presents evidence from real-world case studies from multiple countries to discuss new skills that suit new paradigms
Understanding digital technology in daily life: why we should think holistically in terms of a digital environment instead of discrete devices and apps. Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration.
Our digital world is often described using terms such as immateriality and virtuality. The discourse of cloud computing is the latest in a long line of nebulous, dematerialising tropes which have come to dominate how we think about information and communication technologies. Digital Media Ecologies argues that such rhetoric is highly misleading, and that engaging with the key cultural, agential, ethical and political impacts of contemporary media requires that we do not just engage with the surface level of content encountered by the end users of digital media, but that we must additionally consider the affordances of software and hardware. Whilst numerous existing approaches explore content, software and hardware individually, Digital Media Ecologies provides a critical intervention by insisting that addressing contemporary technoculture requires a synthetic approach that traverses these three registers. Digital Media Ecologies re-envisions the methodological approach of media ecology to go beyond the metaphor of a symbolic information environment that exists alongside a material world of tantalum, turtles and tornados. It illustrates the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of contemporary media assemblages through examples that include mining conflict-sustaining minerals, climate change blogging, iOS jailbreaking, and the ecological footprint of contemporary computing infrastructures. Alongside foregrounding the deleterious social and environmental impacts of digital technologies, the book considers numerous ways that these issues are being tackled by a heterogeneous array of activists, academics, hackers, scientists and citizens using the same technological assemblages that ostensibly cause these problems.
The first edition of Toward a Unified Ecology was ahead of its time. For the second edition, the authors present a new synthesis of their core ideas on evaluating communities, organisms, populations, biomes, models, and management. The book now places greater emphasis on post-normal critiques, cognizant of ever-present observer values in the system. The problem it addresses is how to work holistically on complex things that cannot be defined, and this book continues to build an approach to the problem of scaling in ecosystems. Provoked by complexity theory, the authors add a whole new chapter on the central role of narrative in science and how models improve them. The book takes data and modeling seriously, with a sophisticated philosophy of science.
The book presents a consistent and complete ecosystem theory based on thermodynamic concepts. The first chapters are devoted to an interpretation of the first and second law of thermodynamics in ecosystem context. Then Prigogine's use of far from equilibrium thermodynamic is used on ecosystems to explain their reactions to perturbations. The introduction of the concept exergy makes it possible to give a more profound and comprehensive explanation of the ecosystem's reactions and growth-patterns. A tentative fourth law of thermodynamic is formulated and applied to facilitate these explanations. The trophic chain, the global energy and radiation balance and pattern and the reactions of ecological networks are all explained by the use of exergy. Finally, it is discussed how the presented theory can be applied more widely to explain ecological observations and rules, to assess ecosystem health and to develop ecological models.
Design, Ecology, Politics links social and ecological theory to design theory and practice, critiquing the ways in which the design industry perpetuates unsustainable development. Boehnert argues that when design does engage with issues of sustainability, this engagement remains shallow, due to the narrow basis of analysis in design education and theory. The situation is made more severe by design cultures which claim to be apolitical. Where design education fails to recognise the historical roots of unsustainable practice, it reproduces old errors. New ecologically informed design methods and tools hold promise only when incorporated into a larger project of political change. Design, Ecology, Politics describes how ecological literacy challenges many central assumptions in design theory and practice. By bringing design, ecology and socio-political theory together, Boehnert describes how power is constructed, reproduced and obfuscated by design in ways which often cause environmental harms. She uses case studies to illustrate how communication design functions to either conceal or reveal the ecological and social impacts of current modes of production. The transformative potential of design is dependent on deep-reaching analysis of the problems design attempts to address. Ecologically literate and critically engaged design is a practice primed to facilitate the creation of viable, sustainable and just futures. With this approach, designers can make sustainability not only possible, but attractive.
Understanding digital technology in daily life: why we should think holistically in terms of a digital environment instead of discrete devices and apps. Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration.
Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. This classic anthology of his major work includes a new Foreword by his daughter, Mary Katherine Bateson. 5 line drawings.