Precision agriculture nowadays has great importance as it brings together the knowledge acquired through traditional cultivation techniques with precision and technological automation. One of the inherent techniques of precision agriculture is hydroponics, with plants growing using aqueous solutions and without soil availability. Although NFT (Nutrient Film Technique) systems are already well-developed systems, there is a big difference between home projects and highly automated processes, which in turn require high investment values. Among other things, in this work, the aim was to study and developed algorithms that allow the efficient recirculation of water, allowing electricity savings to be around 40% compared to more traditional systems.

The Internet of Things has become a reality over the last few years, such that new devices that were developed, allow the user to control and get information about his home remotely. There are several kinds of devices available on the market, some of which are difficult to interact with, sometimes due to the fact that they are out of sight or out of reach. This demo focuses on the interaction with a smart water network using Alexa, the virtual assistant by Amazon, as well as through a mobile application and a website. To assess the interaction, a smart water network was deployed at four different sites so that consumption data could be collected. Usability studies were conducted to asses all three types of interaction.

As technology innovation rapidly changes service experiences, service designers need to leverage technology and orchestrate complex service systems to create innovative services while enabling seamless customer experiences. Service design builds upon contributions from multiple fields, including management, information technology, and interaction design. Still, more integration to leverage the role of technology for service innovation is needed. This article integrates these two service design perspectives, management and interaction design, into an interdisciplinary methodthe Management and INteraction Design for Service (MINDS). Using a design science research approach, MINDS synthesizes management perspective models, which focus on creating new value propositions and orchestrating multiple service interfaces, with interaction design perspective models, which focus on technology usage and its surrounding context. This article presents applications of the MINDS method in two different service industries (media and health care) to demonstrate how MINDS enables creating innovative technology-enabled services and advances interdisciplinary service research.

As technology innovation rapidly changes service experiences, service designers need to leverage technology and orchestrate complex service systems to create innovative services while enabling seamless customer experiences. Service design builds upon contributions from multiple fields, including management, information technology, and interaction design. Still, more integration to leverage the role of technology for service innovation is needed. This article integrates these two service design perspectives, management and interaction design, into an interdisciplinary method—the Management and INteraction Design for Service (MINDS). Using a design science research approach, MINDS synthesizes management perspective models, which focus on creating new value propositions and orchestrating multiple service interfaces, with interaction design perspective models, which focus on technology usage and its surrounding context. This article presents applications of the MINDS method in two different service industries (media and health care) to demonstrate how MINDS enables creating innovative technology-enabled services and advances interdisciplinary service research.

In model-based engineering (MBE), the abstraction power of models is used to deal with the ever increasing complexity of modern software systems. As models play a central role in MBE-based development processes, for the adoption of MBE in practical projects it becomes indispensable to introduce rigorous methods for ensuring the correctness of the models. Consequently, much effort has been spent on developing and applying validation and verification (V&V) techniques for models. However, there are still many open challenges. In this paper, we shortly review the status quo of V&V techniques in MBE and derive a catalogue of open questions whose answers would contribute to successfully putting MBE into practice.

Health information systems are becoming ubiquitous throughout healthcare delivery processes. Governments, enticed by the potential for improved patient care and cost reduction, are pushing for more integrated IT systems in healthcare. However, the successful adoption of these systems depends on the value they create as a service for healthcare professionals and how they support their activities. Following a call for more multidisciplinary research in health information systems and increased end-user participation in HIS development, this study presents a service perspective that considers users of health information systems (HIS) as active partners and co-creators of value, instead of passive recipients of the functionalities brought by these IT systems. From a service perspective we frame healthcare professionals as customers of HIS, and analyze how they can better support healthcare provision. We present an in-depth study of primary care professionals experience with the HIS of the Portuguese National Health Service. Experience was systematized using Customer Experience Modeling, a method that takes into account the holistic nature of experience. Results portray and evaluate HIS according to professionals' experience requirements. They also show a fragmented reality where HIS usefulness is being hampered by integration and performance issues. HIS design guidelines are also posited.

Purpose - Customer experience has become increasingly important for service organizations that see it as a source of sustainable competitive advantage, and for service designers, who consider it fundamental to any service design project. Design/methodology/approach - Integrating contributions from different fields, CEM was conceptually developed to represent the different aspects of customer experience in a holistic diagrammatic representation. CEM was further developed with an application to a multimedia service. To further develop and build CEM's models, 17 customers of a multimedia service provider were interviewed and the data were analyzed using Grounded Theory methodology. Findings - Combining multidisciplinary contributions to represent customer experience elements enables the systematization of its complex information. The application to a multimedia service highlights how CEM can facilitate the work of multidisciplinary design teams by providing more insightful inputs to service design. Originality/value - CEM supports the holistic nature of customer experience, providing a systematic portrayal of its context and shifting the focus from single experience elements to their orchestration.

The development and widespread market acceptance of recent technological devices, such as smart phones and tablets, poses new challenges and great opportunities for innovative service designs. In fact these devices no longer merely replicate the same functionalities in different contexts, they can also dynamically interact among themselves when in close proximity. Thus, this is a two-fold challenge for service designers, they must handle the additional points of contact between service providers and their customers independently, and also in combinations. In this paper we present the relevant concepts for designing multi-interface services, and also introduce the concept of dynamic service interfaces. We illustrate these dynamic service interfaces by presenting an application to the design of a new multimedia service. This service makes use of dynamic service interfaces to deliver an improved and innovative customer experience.

Designers aspire to create engaging and desirable experiences. To that end they study users, aiming to better understand their preferences, ways of thinking and desired outcomes. In the service sector this task is more intricate as experiences encompass the whole customer journey, or the sequence of moments of interaction between customer and company. In services, one poorly designed interaction can severely compromise the overall experience. Despite experience holistic nature, current methods address its components separately, failing to provide an overall systematized picture. This paper presents Customer Experience Modeling, a novel multidisciplinary approach to systematize, represent and evaluate customer experiences to guide service and interaction design efforts. We illustrate this method with an application to a multimedia service provider built upon 17 interviews with service users.

A modeling tool not only helps users express their ideas and thoughts but also serves as a communication platform among domain experts, designers, developers, and others practitioners. Existing modeling tools have shortcomings in terms of supported functionality and situated usability or do not meet the needs of users of varying levels of expertise. To facilitate improvement of such modeling tools, this research begins by identifying common problems in existing tools and proceeds by borrowing concepts from grounded theory to develop a framework of redesign guidelines. A case study illustrates how this framework can be used by applying it to MetaSketch, a metamodeling tool. The study employs multiple user experience research methods, including usability tests with paper prototypes, observations, interviews, and contextual inquiries. A set of core tasks and two significant modeling approaches were identified that directly influence interface and interaction design for modeling tools.

The Model Driven Development has its foundations on metamodeling and new tools are required in order to support users on the definition and customization of their modeling languages. The MetaSketch Editor takes advantage of the current OMG technology to provide the metamodeling mechanisms required to support the integration of some widely used human-computer interaction (HCI) notation into the UML, through precise and semantically sound metamodeling extensions. With this integration, HCI field could contribute to leverage the model-driven development paradigm and support automatic generation of interactive applications.

UML has become the standard language for modelling in different areas and domains, but it is widely recognized that it lacks support for User Interface Design (UID). On the other hand, Concur Task Tree (CTT) is one of the most widely used notations for task and dialogue modelling. An important achievement is the proposed notation and semantics for CTT by extending the UML metamodel, proving that task modelling in user interface design can be accomplished by a UML compliant notation. For the interface structure design was proposed that UML's CTT could be complemented with Canonical Abstract Prototypes (CAP) leading to a model-based user interface design method co-specified by the presentation (CAP) and behaviour (UML's CTT) perspectives. In this paper we propose another step in this UID method by defining a specific model compliant with the OMG recommended Model Driven Architecture (MDA), which will be the intermediary between the design model and an implementation of the user interface. This proposal will align the UID method with the MDA recommendation making it possible to automatically generate interface prototypes from conceptual models.

ConcurTaskTrees (CTT) is one of the most widely used notations for task modeling, specifically tailored for user interface model-based design. The integration of CTT with a de facto standard modeling language was already identified as an important issue, but there is no consensus about the best approach to achieve this goal. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative strengths and weaknesses of control and data flow specification in UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams to represent CTT semantics. The analysis is driven by the definition of pattern-based activities for the temporal operators in CTT. In this paper, we propose an extension of the UML 2.0 abstract syntax that fully supports the concepts behind CTTs and provides an adapted graphical notation for a UML-like representation.

When we consider models in model-based design (MBD) approaches in the HCI field, we can say that the first generation of tool for user interface construction was based on database models. The second generation of MBD approaches includes models such as the user model, task model, cognitive model, system model etc. However, the third generation of models is the one facing current and future challenges. In this summary report, we present our discussion on the future challenges of MBD.

In this paper, we argue that the combination of task modeling with abstract prototyping improves the effectiveness of the user interface design at an early stage of the development process. Currently there is no effective way to connect popular task and presentation based formalisms (e.g. ConcurTask Trees -- CTTs and Canonical Abstract Prototypes -- CAPs) in interactive system development. Here we present and illustrate an approach that relates CTTs with CAPs under the common semantics of the UML 2.0. We find that an abstract prototype is more suitable as a starting point to represent and infer the task structure that supports the user interaction. Our approach is supported by the DialogSketch tool, which enables the creation, design and editing of a UML version of CAPs and CTTs that can be co-edited and simulated in an innovative way that leverages effective and usable simulation of abstract user-interfaces.