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A demo presentation of the GoTriple crowdfunding solution.&nbsp

The Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus describes the synergies and trade-offs between water, energy and food. Despite the significant attention that the WEF nexus has received in recent years, challenges remain, primarily related to gaps in integrated data, information and knowledge related to the most critical inter-linkages and their dynamics. These WEF nexus complexities and uncertainty make decision-making and future forecasting extremely difficult. Policy makers and other stakeholders are currently faced with the task of understanding longer term environmental impacts and tJhe benefits and limitations of innovations that could be potentially beneficial, such as Anaerobic Digestion as a waste solution or insect protein production. This paper describes an approach to support decision making for local-level innovations within the WEF nexus by creating a set of sustainability indicators and an accompanying interactive visualisation. The indicators were derived from stakeholder consultation processes and workshops, and they were selected to include a much broader assessment than just financial aspects when considering the viability of such innovations. By taking this bottom-up approach and placing stakeholders at the heart of the project, we produced a visualisation tool to support sustainable decision making when considering the implementation of WEF innovations. Considering other, often overlooked factors and giving greater priority to these deepens knowledge and the recognition of influential issues that in conventional processes may be overlooked. This visualisation tool is designed to support decision makers to engage in a exploration of the different interlinkages, and to be the basis of stakeholder dialogue around sustainability. The visualisation tool developed was designed to be easily modifiable in order to be updated with new insights and to include other future innovations.

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With the ever-increasing development of digital technologies, understanding their acceptance or rejection is important. A great deal of research, led by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), shows that technology acceptance is a hot and complex topic. Much of it has been quantitative and operationalized within mandatory—workplace/organizational—contexts, where instrumental aspects of technology use (e.g., efficiency and productivity) play a central role. In this chapter, we report on a qualitative case study—based on 3 in-person learning courses—of factors that can help us foster programming acceptance in the everyday lives of older and adult people with low levels of formal education. We discuss the relative relevance of technology acceptance constructs, showing that perceived ease-of-use is much less relevant than perceived usefulness, because all participants had to find the fit of programming in their lives. We show that two social aspects—the figure of the course instructor and the group—were key to introduce programming and encourage decision-making. We also discuss some methodological issues, such as the difficulties in asking validated items of TAM (e.g. “I have the knowledge necessary to use the system”) to our participants.

Social sciences and humanities (SSH) research is divided across a wide array of disciplines, sub-disciplines and languages. While this specialization makes it possible to investigate the extensive variety of SSH topics, it also leads to a fragmentation that prevents SSH research from reaching its full potential. The TRIPLE project brings answers to these issues by developing an innovative discovery platform for SSH data, researchers&rsquo, projects and profiles. Having started in October 2019, the project has already three main achievements that are presented in this paper: (1) the definition of main features of the GOTRIPLE platform, (2) its interoperability, (3) its multilingual, multicultural and interdisciplinary vocation. These results have been achieved thanks to different methodologies such as a co-design process, market analysis and benchmarking, monitoring and co-building. These preliminary results highlight the need for respecting diversity of practices and communities through coordination and harmonization.

Food waste is a problem for which solutions are recognised but not readily put into practice. What should be the primary objective, reducing or eliminating surplus food production, requires great change within social, cultural and economic structures. The secondary approach of redistributing surplus food to areas of deficit (in terms of socio-economic groups and/or geographic regions) involves a significant logistical burden, and suffers the same issues as with the elimination of waste. The least desirable, but perhaps most practicable approach, is the use of food waste as a feedstock for Anaerobic Digestion (AD). The strategic adoption of AD can therefore be seen as an important step towards mitigating food waste, but the implementation of efficient AD systems on a large (county/region) scale involves significant complexity. The optimal number, size and location of AD plants, and whether they are centralised versus decentralised, may be determined by considering factors such as supply and proximity to feedstock, transport links, emission hazards and social impact. Reaching balanced and objective decisions when faced with such disparate criteria is inevitably very difficult. To address this problem we prototype and evaluate a decision support tool for county-scale AD planning. Our approach is a hybridised Agent Based Model (ABM) with a Multi Objective Optimisation. We capture the spatio-temporal dependencies that exist in the water, energy and food systems associated with energy derived from food waste using Agent Based Modelling (ABM). The use of Interactive Multi Criteria Analysis as visual analytics offers a means to communicate the co-benefits and trade-offs that may emerge, as well as prioritise the AD strategies, based on the prioritization of criteria. Specifically, the method supports exploration of the social, environmental and economic impact of different AD strategies and decisions, linked to current issues, namely AD scale and adoption. The results highlight a trade-off between transport costs and social acceptability for the AD centralised versus decentralised strategies. When low carbon options are weighted higher then slow, steady and aggressive decentralised strategies are the best strategic adoption of AD. Conversely, when Energy production is considered a priority, then aggressive scaling up in a centralised approach is best with slow and steady approaches being further from the ideal. The framework has demonstrated that it permits a space for dialogue and transparent prioritization of AD strategies based on WEF nexus impacts.

Social Sciences and Humanities research is divided across a wide array of disciplines, sub- disciplines and languages. While this specialisation makes it possible to investigate the extensive variety of SSH topics, it also leads to a fragmentation that prevents SSH research from reaching its full potential. Use and reuse of research is suboptimal, interdisciplinary collaboration possibilities are often missed partially because of missing standards and referential keys between disciplines. Often, the reuse of data may paradoxically complicate a relevant sorting of data and a trust relationship between researchers. As a result, societal, economic and academic impacts are limited. Conceptually, there is a wealth of transdisciplinary collaborations, but in practice there is a need to help researchers and research institutions to connect them and support them, to prepare the research data for these overarching approaches and to make them findable and usable. The TRIPLE (Targeting Researchers through Innovative Practices and Linked Exploration) project is a practical answer to the above issues, as it aims at designing and developing the European discovery platform dedicated to Social Sciences and Humanities resources. Funded under the European Commission program INFRAEOSC-02-2019 “Prototyping new innovative services”, thanks to a consortium of 19 partners, TRIPLE will develop a full multilingual and multicultural solution for the discovery and the reuse of Social Sciences and Humanities resources. The project started in October 2019 for a duration of 42 months thanks to European funding of 5.6 million €.

In recent years, the design and deployment of persuasive interventions for inducing sustainable urban mobility behaviors has become a very active research field, leveraging on the pervasive usage of social media and mobile apps by citizens in their daily life. Several challenges in designing and assessing motivational features for effective and long-lasting behavior change in this area have also been identified, such as the focus of most solutions on targeting and prescribing individual (versus collective) mobility choices, as well as a general lack of large-scale evaluations on the impact of these solutions on citizens' life. This paper reports lessons learnt from three parallel and complementary user studies, where motivational features for sustainable urban mobility, including social influence strategies delivered through social media, were prototyped, tested and refined. By reflecting on our results and design experiences so far, we aim to provide better guidance for future development of more effective solutions supporting citizens' adoption of sustainable mobility behaviors in urban settings.

This paper describes our initial work towards a segmentation-based approach to personalized digital behavior change interventions in the domain of sustainable, multi-modal urban transport. Segmentation is a key concept in market research, and within the transport domain, Anable has argued that there are segments of travelers that are relatively homogenous in terms of their mobility attitudes and behaviors. We describe an approach aimed at tailoring behavior change notifications by using segmentation-based techniques for user profiling. We report results from a Mechanical Turk study in which we obtained a crowd-sourced categorization of motivational messages. This is a first step towards understanding how to better deliver persuasive messages to relevant users profiles and situational contexts in the urban mobility domain. We conclude by discussing future steps of our work that should inform the deployment of persuasion profiling techniques to achieve sustainable mobility goals.

Decisions on environmental topics taken today are going to have long-term consequences that will affect future generations. Young people will have to live with the consequences of these decisions and undertake special responsibilities. Moreover, as tomorrow’s decision makers, they themselves should learn how to negotiate and debate issues before final decisions are made. Therefore, any participation they can have in environmental decision making processes will prove essential in developing a sustainable future for the community.

We introduce a methodology for tracking and auditing feedback, errors and suggestions for software packages. This short paper describes how we innovate on the evaluation mechanism, introducing an (Antecedent, Barrier, Consequence and Development) ABCD form, embedded within an eParticipation platform to enable end users to easily report on any usability issues. This methodology will be utilised to improve the STEP cloud e-Participation platform (part of the current STEP Horizon2020 project http://step4youth.eu . The platform is currently being piloted in real life contexts, with the participation of public authorities that are integrating the eParticipation platform into their regular decision-making practices. The project is involving young people, through engagement and motivation strategies and giving them a voice in Environmental decision making at the local level. The pilot evaluation aims to demonstrate how open engagement needs to be embedded within public sector processes and the usability methodology reported here will help to identify the key barriers for wide scale deployment of the platform.

Scientific software development projects that integrate usability and user- centered design methods can have an impact that goes beyond a limited set of users.

In this paper we introduce a gamification model for encouraging sustainable multi-modal urban travel in modern European cities. Our aim is to provide a mechanism that encourages users to reflect on their current travel behaviours and to engage in more environmentally friendly activities that lead to the formation of sus- tainable, long-term travel behaviours. To achieve this our users track their own be- haviours, set goals, manage their progress towards those goals, and respond to chal- lenges. Our approach uses a point accumulation and level achievement metaphor to abstract from the underlying specifics of individual behaviours and goals to allow an extensible and flexible platform for behaviour management. We present our model within the context of the SUPERHUB project and platform.

Summary The production of fine roots is one of the principal means by which carbon, fixed during photosynthesis, enters the soil, and quantifying the production for particular combinations of environmental and biotic factors is important for predicting the sequestration of carbon in the soils of grassland ecosystems. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can have a major effect on the production of roots, and we studied how colonization by AMF affects the lifespan of roots. Twenty per cent of control roots of Trifolium repens survived for longer than 42 days whereas 37% survived that long in AMF-colonized plants. The overall survival of the roots of Lolium perenne was less than in T. repens: around 10% of roots survived beyond 42 days and this was not affected by AMF colonization. Previous studies have shown that lifespans of roots can be affected by temperature. We tested the hypothesis that these observations are linked to a change in the morphology of the root system caused by temperature and also by AMF. We found that inoculation with AMF in a microcosm study using Plantago lanceolata grown at various temperatures, with and without AMF, showed no clear effect of AMF on branching patterns. Temperature had a significant effect on total lengths, numbers and branching rates of some higher orders of roots. Total lengths of both secondary and tertiary roots grown at 27°C were about double those of plants grown at 15°C. Colonization by AMF tended to reduce this effect. Evidently the effect of colonization by AMF on root lifespan depends on the species. Increased branching, and thus a greater proportion of ephemeral roots, was responsible for shortening the lives of the roots at increased temperature, which suggests a strong link between lifespan and morphology.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are obligate symbionts which can only be propagated in association with intact plants or root explants. Molecular study of these fungi has been hampered by the inability to grow them in vitro and to obtain protoplasts. With the advent of advanced gene transformation systems, the opportunity has arisen to use biolistic technology to introduce foreign DNA linked to molecular markers into these fungi. The biolistic transformation system chosen for the AMF was GUS-based as this system was shown to work effectively for ectomycorrhiza. In this study the plasmid pNOM102 was used for transformation of Gigaspora rosea and transient GUS gene expression was detected in 40-50% of spores by colorimetric and immunological based methodologies.

The production and mortality of roots is an important factor determining nutrient and carbon fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. However, the effect of temperature on the longevity of roots is not understood. In this study the impact of changes in temperature on the longevity of Lolium perenne roots was determined.

This paper describes the User-Centred Design process followed within the SUPERHUB project in order to investigate requirements, elicit user feedback and refine motivational features of a mobile app fostering the adoption of sustainable behaviors for urban mobility. We report the main lessons learnt from focus groups, participatory design sessions, and low-mid fidelity prototyping of the motivational features designed. These lessons are currently informing our implementation work in SUPERHUB and could be of interest for designers in the eco-sustainability field.

Comunicació presentada a: the 26th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction celebrada del 12 a1 14 de setembre de 2012 a Birmingham, Regne Unit. This paper reports on a classical, face-to-face ethnographical study of YouTube use and social sharing practices by 32 older people (65-90). The study was conducted in a computer clubhouse in Scotland over an 18-month period. Whereas research on Social Network Sites (SNS) is on the rise, very little is known about how people aged 60+ use them in their everyday lives, despite an ageing population. The study shows that the use of YouTube by this group of older people is occasional and motivated by face-to-face or online conversations in e-mails. They watch videos that they find meaningful, do not upload videos because they do not perceive any benefit in it, and search for videos by writing sentences, instead of clicking on categories, to reduce cognitive load. Online comments in YouTube are seldom read nor made. Instead, they make comments in f2f, and/or emails, always with key members of their social circles. They rate videos in these online and offline conversations, and share videos by capitalizing on previously learned strategies, such as copyand- paste. We argue that these results provide a more complete picture of SNS and older people than that given by previous studies, and enable a discussion on their User Experience. We also discuss some implications for design.

Older adults are often encouraged to try new technology by a specific motivator or 'trigger'. Recently, a surprising 'trigger' has emerged - the 'ash cloud' which caused large scale disruption for air travel across Europe earlier in 2010. Understanding why this unexpected event managed to motivate interest into technology where other efforts have failed may provide further insight for research looking at the digitally disinterested.

In this paper, we describe the User Centre at the University of Dundee which provides a space for older people and technology to come together for the benefit of new learning opportunities, social interaction and research.

L'impact des champignons mycorhizogenes arbusculaires sur le developpement et l'architecture des systemes racinaires est maintenant largement reconnu. Cependant les interactions avec des parametres environnementaux, importants dans des systemes naturels et agricoles, n'ont pas encore ete identifiees. Cette etude utilise les microcosmes pour determiner les effets des differentes temperatures (15, 21, 27°C) sur le changement du systeme racinaire de Plantago lanceolata induits par le champignon mycorhizogene arbusculaire Glomus mosseae. A l'oppose des plantes appartenant a d'autres especes, la colonisation par le champignon mycorhizogene reduit la ramification des racines. Des interactions avec la temperature ont ete identifiees mais on n'a pas observe de correlations entre effet du champignon mycorhizogene et colonisation des racines. Des implications possibles de ces resultats sont discutees.

Increasing diabetes prevalence has led to the need for more sustainable and person-centred services. The diabetes self-care mHealth marketplace is growing, but most effective/valued features are unknown. This study gauges diabetes app user opinion to inform development work. An analysis of diabetes mHealth apps informed design of a questionnaire sent to a random sample of 400 patients stratified by diabetes type and age. Responses were analysed by sub-group, and preferences were compared with current diabetes apps. App features included data storage/graphics, exercise tracking, health/diet, reminders/alarms, education. Questionnaire response rate was 59 per cent (234/400); 144/233 (62%) owned smartphones. Smartphone users expressed preference towards mHealth (101/142 (71%)), although diabetes use was low (12/163 (7%)). Respondents favoured many potential features, with similar preferences between diabetes types. This study demonstrates that while mHealth acceptance is high, current engagement is low. Engagement and functionality could be improved by including stakeholders in future development, driven by clinical/user need.

A growing ageing population and an increasing reliance on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to conduct activities associated with daily living means that addressing how older people learn to use ICT is timely and important. By drawing on a 4-year ethnographical study with 420 older people in two different environments, this paper shows that they adopt three strategies to become successful ICT learners, whilst at the same time dealing with the effects of age-related changes in fluid memory: (i) linking learning to real-life needs, (ii) learning collaboratively and informally, and (iii) adopting appropriate memory aids. This paper also addresses the question of how valid these results will be when today’s ICT-literate adult people grow older. The longitudinal aspect of the data gathered shows that older people become confident ICT learners over time, the learning strategies and cognitive-related difficulties are mostly time-persistent, and their life experience is always important in learning transfer. Implications for providing older people with a more integrated approach to ICT learning are discussed. We also acknowledge the support from the Commission for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Innovation, Universities and Enterprise of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia, and the ESRC’s New Dynamics of Ageing Programme (Grant Number RES-353-25- 0008).

Previous research on indicators for measuring the success of Open Science tends to operate at a macro/global level and very rarely addresses the need to measure success at the level of a single project. However, this previous research has the merit of arguing for the definition of indicators that offer an alternative to more traditional bibliometric measures or indicators that focus on mere performance. This paper is the outcome of work conducted for a specific project that aims to build a discovery platform for social sciences and humanities, the platform GoTriple. GoTriple is designed taking inspiration from Open Science principles and has been built through a user-centered approach. The paper details the practice-led work conducted by the GoTriple team for assessing the meaning of the term success for the project and to identify indicators. To this end, this paper proposes the concept of compass indicators and presents how the project team arrived at the definition of this concept. The paper also highlights a distinction between compass indicators, which are modest measures, and key performance indicators, which tend to be tied up with measurable objectives. Compass indicators are defined as indicators that do not aim to achieve a specified numerical target of success but rather explain the journey of a project toward achieving certain desirable outcomes and offer insights to take action. Compass indicators defined for the project embrace areas such as diversity, inclusivity, collaboration, and the general use of the platform. In the final discussion, the paper offers reflections on the potential relevance of the notion of compass indicators and closes with a discussion of the next steps for this work.