Giorgio De Michelis

Giorgio De Michelis
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (DISCo)

Professor

About

140
Publications
16,265
Reads
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2,086
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 1998 - December 2012
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Description
  • Interaction Design, CSCW, Communityware, Web-services
January 1972 - October 1998
University of Milan
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (140)
Article
Il lavoro è oggi al centro di una crisi irreversibile causata dalla convergere di due fenomeni epocali: l'esaurissi definitivo del Taylor-fordismo, ormai incapace di dare senso alla vita degli uomini e l'esplosione della rivoluzione digitale. Questa, come affermato dal Michel Serres, è la terza rivoluzione soft, antropologica e sta mutando in modo...
Article
Full-text available
Designing interactive prototypes involves multiple tools and skills. In addition, several design cycles are required to iterate through idea generation, evaluation of design alternatives, and development. Consequently, prototyping tools should offer flexibility and adaptability to allow designers to quickly test and evaluate different ideas, design...
Article
Full-text available
L'idea in breve Next Generation EU è una opportunità epocale per la ripresa dopo la pandemia e per innovare l'Italia. L'attuale acutissima discussione di oggi 14 Dicembre 2020 si concentra sulle scelte strategiche e sulla governance del PNRR (Piano Nazionale di ripresa e resilienza). Non entriamo ora in questa difficile discussione che confidiamo t...
Book
Il Patto per il Lavoro dell'Emilia-Romagna è stato il risultato di un insieme di programmazione, politica industriale e della scienza, politica del lavoro e formativa, condotto con la partecipazione di 50 soggetti pubblici e privati che hanno operato con una modalità «a doppia elica», ossia risolvere i problemi correnti e programmare un futuro dive...
Chapter
Carl Adam Petri never wrote a book, and his few papers are generally not written in the standard format of scientific articles, being so rich and dense that they constitute a serious challenge for readers, even experts. On the other hand, he dedicated great care to his slides, preparing a new collection for almost every talk he gave.
Chapter
Within innovative companies competing in the globalized market we can observe two distinct phenomena characterizing their changes with respect to the past: the proliferation of organizational networks and the raise of a new profile of top manager/entrepreneur that has been called business designer. Scholars and practitioners are paying great attent...
Chapter
Encountering Things brings together leading design scholars to explore the relationship between thing theory and design, exploring production processes and offering an engaging, theoretical perspective about the social and cultural lives of objects. Focusing on the themes of process and product, the contributors investigate the productive interplay...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We present Touch&Screen, a wide set of interaction techniques for the remote control of widgets (menu, lists, videos, maps etc.) for large screens through smartphones. After presenting the design of these widgets and the related control interfaces of the smartphone, we evaluated the interaction through two user studies. The first study (48 users) a...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, I take the book by Michel Serres, “Thumbelina”, as an occasion for reflection on the conceptual basis of knowledge management, as was built by Nonaka and co-workers. The direct access to knowledge that Thumbelina practices together with her peers is, in fact, for me, and is a good observation point to bring Nonaka’s reflection furthe...
Conference Paper
Carl Adam Petri is well known for introducing the nets having his name. It is less known that net theory was, for Petri, the kernel of a radical shift in scientific knowledge. Carl Adam Petri has not written extensively during his life and this may have been an important reason that only the most applied part of his approach, the use of nets for de...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper I take the book by Michel Serres “Thumbelina” as the occasion for a reflection on the conceptual basis of knowledge management, as it was built by Ikujiro Noanka and co-workers. The direct access to knowledge that Thumbelina practices together with her peers is, in fact, for me, a god observation point to bring the reflection of Nonak...
Chapter
This paper surveys the application of Socio-Technical Design (STD) in the deployment of computer based systems in organizations and tries to explain its successes and difficulties relating it to the evolution of information systems. Moreover, it continues this story recalling the contributions given to the interactions between humans and machines i...
Chapter
This chapter wants to go back to the emergence of space and knowledge in human discourse and to their inextricable links to understand what happens to them with ICT. In doing so, it adopts a phenomenological stance from which it emerges with great clarity that knowing is deeply grounded on space. From this viewpoint, knowledge is what links words a...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper, we investigate how cloud computing can be seen as a planned result or perhaps a consequence of IT transformation initiatives. To this end we discuss the case of eni, a multinational utility corporation based in Italy. The analysis has been carried out following an interpretative perspective, on the basis of the observation of the cur...
Chapter
After a 1 year long preparation, at April 1st 2008, we had the kickoff meeting of itsme, a project with the ambition of designing and building an innovative front end of Linux for workstations (De Michelis et al. 2009). The idea behind our project was to go beyond the desktop metaphor shaping all existing operating systems for workstations (Windows...
Chapter
Some members of EUSSET (European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies), the European professional association dedicated to the development of technological tools and infrastructures that incorporate a human-centred design perspective, presented at one of the workshops accompanying the development of the new R&D programme of the European Union...
Conference Paper
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In this paper we discuss some principles to design face-to-face social applications according to the Collective Interaction approach. To foster social involvement an application should encourage participants to take the initiative by supporting social awareness to let them make informed decisions and prevent conflicts. Moreover, applications should...
Article
Full-text available
Interactive artistic installations represent avant-garde forms of Contemporary Art. They are artistic works able to change their behavior in response to the behavior of the viewers, turning them into (more or less) active participants. This paper discusses an interactive installation the authors developed during the beginning of 2012 for the St. El...
Article
In this article, I demonstrate that objectification is an inherently social process situated within a dynamic actor network in which material and semiotic actors create meaning. In some sense, an object is a partial, intentional view of the actor network in which it is situated. In order to understand this approach, I will consider how things and o...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
YouTube4Two is an application that exploits the YouTube media library (through its API) to demonstrate a new style of social interaction. Two co-present people can share a video and act autonomously to navigate the related-video and comment lists, and search for videos. The novelty is that they can use their own smartphones connected via Internet t...
Article
In this paper we present two large user studies in which we gather evidence about the adoption and satisfaction level of users in regard to electronic records that manage health related information from two distinct but complementary perspectives: that of General Practitioners (GPs) about their Electronic Medical Records (EMRs); and that of citizen...
Article
Full-text available
In this position paper we argue that systems supporting Collective Intelligence should satisfy two, up to now neglected, requirements: (i) helping users to situate themselves in the story of the group/community generating it and (ii) reflecting adequately its variable geometry. This moves Collective Intelligence research to deal with platforms for...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Interactive artistic installations, especially the ones exploiting digital technologies, represent an active area of research both from the artistic and technological sides. These works are able to detect different properties of people in the environment (e.g., motion, localization, gestures) and determine their behavior accordingly, for example mo...
Conference Paper
Choreographers may exploit digital technologies to create augmented choreographies where the behavior of dancers determines the behavior of projections, lighting and other scenographic effects. This paper presents the preliminary results of ethnographic studies about how choreographers work from an interaction design perspective. Finally the paper...
Chapter
In the Iliad, Homer wrote a list of the scenes presented on Achilles’ shield. A list so long that many artists have attempted to create the shield, triggering a creative process to find a solution. In the same way librarians have been struggling for years to present knowledge classifications. A structure that has transmigrated from paper book to ta...
Book
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Arts and Technology, ArtsIT 2013, held in Milano, Bicocca, Italy, in March. The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully selected and reviewed from 31 submissions and are organized in topical sections on: art and technology in action, music and...
Article
In this paper we reflect upon design at a conceptual level, discussing how creativity can be coupled with participation and experience, dialoguing with philosophers and social theorists, and looking for the experiential grounds of our understanding of the very nature of design. Three words: 'drawing', 'thing' and 'together', are at the center of ou...
Chapter
This chapter contributes to the debate about the concept of community of practice considering the latter as a means for understanding the behavior of the people using in their practice artifacts and sharing spaces. The experience they share makes them a community and, when the space they share is a workspace, a community of practice. The unusual wa...
Article
Almost all the workstations today still have front-ends inspired by the desktop metaphor created by Alan Kay and co-workers at Xerox PARC in the seventies and giving form to the first Macintosh in the mid-1980s. But time has passed and workstations have changed: their functions and features are continuously growing; their internal memories are reac...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Choreographers are interested in enriched performances where virtual actants play together with live performers. Augmented Choreography can be viewed as the definition of how perceptions generated from the environment turn into commands that influence the environment itself and, in particular, virtual actants. This paper introduces a modular and ex...
Book
A new perspective on design thinking and design practice: beyond products and projects, toward participatory design things. Design Things offers an innovative view of design thinking and design practice, envisioning ways to combine creative design with a participatory approach encompassing aesthetic and democratic practices and values. The authors...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we discuss the lesson that the legacy of Steve Jobs as an entrepreneur leaves to us, with a particular attention to what we, in Italy, can learn from it. Three are the issues we take into consideration: innovation, organization and sustainability. With respect to the first of them, we compare the way Apple has created its innovative p...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Web 2.0 tools are penetrating into organizations after their successful adoption in the consumer domain (e.g., social networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks; wiki-based editing). Some of these new tools and the collaborative processes that they support on the large scale are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI). The...
Article
Full-text available
A new generation of Web tools is penetrating into organizations after their successful adoption within the consumer domain (e.g., social networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks; wiki-based editing). These tools and the collaborative processes that they support on the large scale are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI...
Article
Full-text available
BackgroundIn the last 30years, there has been little innovation in workstations. The desktop metaphor has become the standard user interface, with its pros (e.g., ease of learning) and cons (e.g., interaction constraints for skilled users, lack of context awareness). ObjectivesIn this paper, we present itsme, an Italian initiative to design the ne...
Article
In this paper, we present our experience with a blog as support for our design-oriented courses at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. The experience has been very satisfactory, showing a quantitative and qualitative improvement in students' participation in the learning experience. By adopting the consolidated viewpoints of Computer-Supported...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Over two decades of research in the field of Interaction Design and Computer Supported Cooperative Work convinced us that the current design of workstations no longer fits users’ needs. It is time to design new personal computers based on metaphors alternative to the desktop one. With this SIG, we are seeking to involve international HCI profession...
Article
In the last 30 years, the desktop metaphor has become the standard user interface for workstations, with its pros (e.g., ease of learning) and cons (e.g., interaction constraints for skilled users, lack of context awareness). In this tutorial, we present itsme, an initiative to create the next-generation workstation - especially designed for users...
Chapter
Personal and reflective essays that describe how particular works—whether papers, books, or demos, from classics to forgotten gems—have influenced each writer's approach to HCI. Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on ne...
Conference Paper
We started the work reported on here with the ambition to create inspirational learning environments for design and architecture students in the spirit of Weiser’s vision of taking the computer “out of the box” and making computational resources augment a design studio environment ubiquitously. Computing environments are becoming populated by a ric...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper we present a technological approach to support individual and cooperative interactions in collaborative learning environments. We designed and implemented prototype applications that allow to interact with a shared display by means of infrared-enabled mobile phones. The aim is to develop a technique to decouple personal and presentati...
Conference Paper
This paper presents a research project carried out in the last years at the Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione of the University of Milano. It is aimed at the development of conceptual and modelling tools for office analysis and for the design of office support systems. Specifically, the paper concerns GAMERU, a language for office modelling...
Book
This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and...
Conference Paper
Communities are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. With regard to communities, social capital captures the structural, relational and cognitive aspects of the relationships among their members. Social capital is defined as a set of properties of a social en...
Article
Full-text available
In many environments, the landscape of space and artefacts is evolving and changing with the tasks at hand. Integrating digital media and computation in these environments has to take into account the fact that people will configure space functions and tools accord- ing to the situation, organising use in unexpected ways. In this article, we presen...
Conference Paper
This workshop aims to share interdisciplinary experiences and perspectives in the field of CSCL in the area of Ubiquitous Computing. In particular, interaction and interface design for distributed education; new interaction patterns within and among distributed learning communities: learning experience evaluation; accessibility of learning material...
Article
Full-text available
Most of the available knowledge management systems pay little attention to two important aspects: the need of supporting emerging communities of interest together with the official organizational structure; and the need of cluing together knowledge associated with any kind of involved entity including people, communities, and informal knowledge. Th...
Conference Paper
Workflow Management Systems are one of the main technology for supporting Business Processes and they need to be as flexible as possible. One relevant issue arising from integration between WfMSs and corporate Information Systems is that of undo strategies, policies and mechanisms. In this paper the state of the art for the undo problem and the sol...
Article
Computer and system manufacturers often say that designing applications for users with disabilities is not cost-effective. Most computer systems are designed for users who are not disabled; therefore, systems that address disabled users need special ...
Article
Most of the available knowledge management systems pay little attention to two important aspects: the need of supporting emerging communities of interest together with the official organizational structure; and the need of cluing together knowledge associated with any kind of involved entity including people, communities, and informal knowledge. Th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Most of the available knowledge management systems pay little attention to two important aspects: the need of supporting emerging communities of interest together with the official organizational structure; and the need of cluing together knowledge associated with any kind of involved entity including people, communities, and informal knowledge. Th...
Article
The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in what technology can do to sustain communities. Within the Campiello project innovative information technologies have been adopted to support the dynamic exchange of experiences among people living in cities with high levels of tourism, in this way reducing the progressive diminishing of identity s...
Article
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Information systems technology, computer-supported cooperative work practice, and organizational modeling and planning theories have evolved with only accidental contact to each other. Cooperative information systems is a relatively young research area which tries to systematically investigate the synergies between these research fields, driven by...
Article
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this article, we argue that in order to deal effectively with change, one needs to adopt a comprehensive approach that recognizes the many types of system evolution and their inter-dependencies. Recognizing that various areas of computing, business administration, and social sciences have made substantial advances in understanding and dealing with...
Article
Full-text available
Workflow management systems are considered a hot technology. Nevertheless, up to now they have not had the diffusion other packages such as productivity tools, e-mail systems and groupware platforms have. We believe that this fact is due to the many limitations of current workflow technology (weak support for changes; complex exception handling mec...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper we distinguish between two spatially oriented system design paradigms: weak and strong augmented reality. The weak augmented reality paradigm is then applied in the design of a system supporting co-operation and knowledge creation within a design centre. The system has been designed on the hints we got from two subsequent ethnographie...
Article
Full-text available
Many approaches have been proposed and used to design computer-based systems. Nevertheless, generally the outcomes are not satisfactory from various perspectives (e.g., user satisfaction, technology innovation, etc.). Within this paper ---after analyzing strengths and weaknesses of some of these approaches--- we propose a new `seductive' way for de...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In order to support both the redesign of a Business Process and its continuous improvement, the technology supporting it must be as flexible as possible. Since workflow management systems are the main technology for supporting Business Processes, they and, in particular, their modeling framework must satisfy a long list of apparently conflicting re...
Article
Full-text available
Adaptability of workflow models can be achieved if the specification module of the workflow management system is based on a theoretical kernel, allowing minimal effort for the creation of a workflow model capable of providing, when necessary, any view (and the related services) the users may want of it. The specification module of the workflow mana...
Conference Paper
Petri Nets have been popular among the developers of workflow management systems for more than twenty years [5]: even if we do not consider the early work of Petri himself and Anatol Holt on modelling procedures with Petri Nets, Paul Zisman and Clarence Ellis adopted Petri Nets for modelling workflows in the late seventies. From those early years,...
Conference Paper
Petri Nets have been popular among the developers of workflow management systems for more than twenty years [5]: even if we do not consider the early work of Petri himself and Anatol Holt on modelling procedures with Petri Nets, Paul Zisman and Clarence Ellis adopted Petri Nets for modelling workflows in the late seventies. From those early years,...
Article
Full-text available
As information systems evolve, practitioners may find the best way to handle continual changes is to employ a cohesive approach that recognizes an array of factors. This article presents a three-faceted view of information systems (IS). The group collaboration facet is concerned with people working on a common process, or on an adhoc project. Durin...
Article
In this paper the service paradigm is used to analyze and characterize work processes and their complexity. A work process, from this point of view, is characterized by the communicative relations binding its participants and embedding their performances. The complexity of work processes is then related to organizational design issues, to the empow...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction In their best-selling book M. Hammer and J. Champy (1993) claim that "Business Process Reengineering means putting aside much of the received Wisdom of 200 years of Industrial Management." But the book does not follow the above claim and in their view Business Process Reengineering (BPR) reduces to a radical rationalisation of the proc...
Article
this paper we discuss three issues related to the above claim: . awareness requires both transparency and visibility of the OC. Moreover it requires that the representation of the OC, through which visibility and transparency are achieved, has some learning capabilities; . lack of awareness is a major factor affecting the transaction costs of work...
Article
Full-text available
Workflow Management Systems are composed of two basic components: the Workflow Model and the Workflow Execution Module. The former devoted to supporting the designer of a workflow support system, while the latter executes it when a workflow is started by any authorized user. We claim that the simpler the Workflow Model, the more flexible and adapti...
Article
Full-text available
The debate on the language/action perspective has been exciting the CSCW field for almost ten years. In this paper we recall the most relevant issues raised in it, we also propose a new exploitation of the language/action perspective considering it from the viewpoint of understanding the complexity of communication within work processes and the sit...
Article
Full-text available
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been proposed as a new approach to facing the challenge of improving the quality of a business process while reducing its costs. Workgroup computing systems can be considered as the best candidates for BPR, since they aim to improve the effectiveness of the group of people collaborating within a work process...
Article
Full-text available
This paper discusses the role of process models within work practices from a phenomenological perspective. After a presentation of the approach developed at the CTL - University of Milano considering work practices as embedded in a communicative relation (cooperative process) whose participants are both their performers and their customers, the pap...
Conference Paper
Creative design is a very peculiar work practice that as not been studied very much from the viewpoint of the cooperation shaping it. In this paper we present the main findings of a case study conducted on an industrial design project with the aim of analyzing how its actors cooperate. The main findings of our field study involve: on the one hand,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
After eleven years, CSCW is a well recognized research field which has generated, among other things, some new theoretical findings on work practices and cooperation and some new systems that are successfully applied by several organizations. The evaluation of successful applications from the point of view of the above recalled CSCW theories indica...
Article
Full-text available
Net Theory was introduced in the early sixties by Carl Adam Petri [Pet] as a form of general system theory based on the notion of concurrency. Net Theory has been widely developed during these years, becoming very popular as a framework for the analysis and specification of concurrent systems. Among the basic notions of the theory, stands the synch...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper a framework for the conceptual modelling of organizational contexts is provided and it is embodied into an extension of the TOSCA organizational handbook. The context of a work process is relevant since the effectiveness of the cooperation among its actors is highly dependent on their awareness of it. It requires, on the one hand, tha...
Article
In this paper the service paradigm is used to analyze and characterize work processes and iheir complexity. A work process, from this point of view, is characterized by the communicative relations binding its participants and embedding their performances. The complexity of work processes is then related to organizational design issues, to the empow...
Conference Paper
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has brought to the attention of computer professionals the role computer applications may play supporting collaboration, coordination and communication among people cooperating in a common task. In particular, people acting in accordance with a structured workflow, as a procedure or as a project plan, can...
Article
This workshop aims to bring together people engaged in the study of the relationships beytween organizational learning and CSCW to present and discuss their ideas and findings. Issues will include conceptual frameworks; the role of organizational learning in getting the work done; empirical studies of the relation between organizational learning an...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper analyzes group decision making from a pragmatic point of view, as a sub-process of a cooperative process. It shows how group decision making is carried on through two different co-decision forms (namely co-decision with equal and distinct roles) depending on the positional relations of its participants. Since the position (client or perf...
Article
In this paper the service paradigm is used to analyze and characterize work processes and their complexity. A work process, from this point of view, is characterized by the communicative relations binding its participants and embedding their performances. The complexity of work processes is then related to organizational design issues, to the empow...
Chapter
In this paper I consider work processes as complex customer-performer relations. From this point of view I identify the cooperation network carrying on a work process and analyse the cooperation forms of its members. I show how cooperative work is primarily characterized by the complexity of the inter-actions constituting it, and how it is possible...
Book
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets, held in Torino, Italy in June 1995 The 26 revised refereed papers presented were selected from 73 submissions from 22 countries; in addition there are abstracts or full papers of the three invited talks. All theoretical and applicatio...
Article
Full-text available
UTUCS is a system for supporting a group of people (an office, a team, etc.) interconnected through a communication network in handling conversations carried on through different communication media. It has been developed with the aim of providing a good coordination support system that pairs the best computer-based tool a group may have in any sit...