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The involvement of clients in service encounters and service development has become a central principle for contemporary health and social care organizations. However, in day-to-day work settings, the shift toward client involvement is still in progress. We examined how health and social care professionals, together with clients and managers, co-develop their conceptions of client involvement and search for practical ways in which to implement these in organizational service processes.

The empirical case of this study was a developmental intervention, the client involvement workshop, conducted in a Finnish municipal social and welfare center. The cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framework was used to analyze the development of client involvement ideas and the modes of interaction during the intervention.

Analysis of the collective discussion revealed that the conceptions of client involvement developed through two interconnected object-orientations: Enabling client involvement in service encounters and promoting client involvement in the service system. The predominant mode of interaction in the collective discussion was that of “coordination.” The clients' perspective and contributions were central aspects in the turning points from coordination to cooperation; professionals crossed organizational boundaries, and together with clients, constructed a new client involvement-based object. This suggests that client participation plays an important role in the development of services.

The CHAT-based examination of the modes of interaction clarifies the potential of co-developing client-involvement-based services and highlights the importance of clients' participation in co-development.

This paper aims to present a procedure to change the orientation of a grasped object using dexterous manipulation. The manipulation is controlled by teleoperation in a very simple way, with the commands introduced by an operator using a keyboard.

The paper shows a teleoperation scheme, hand kinematics and a manipulation strategy to manipulate different objects using the Schunk Dexterous Hand (SDH2). A state machine is used to model the teleoperation actions and the system states. A virtual link is used to include the contact point on the hand kinematics of the SDH2.

Experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed approach with different objects, varying the initial grasp configuration and the sequence of actions commanded by the operator.

The proposed approach uses a shared telemanipulation schema to perform dexterous manipulation; in this schema, the operator sends high-level commands and a local system uses this information, jointly with tactile measurements and the current status of the system, to generate proper setpoints for the low-level control of the fingers, which may be a commercial close one. The main contribution of this work is the mentioned local system, simple enough for practical applications and robust enough to avoid object falls.

Despite the fact that there being a large literature on simulation, there is as yet no generic paradigm or architecture to develop a three-dimensional (3-D) simulator which depends on autonomous intelligent objects. This has motivated us to introduce a 3-D simulation system based on intelligent objects for Physics Experimentation. We formulated the system’s components as an object-orientation model. So, the entities in every experiment’s work cell are modeled by characterizing their properties and functions into classes and objects of the system hierarchy. Intelligent objects are realized by developing a knowledge base (KB) that captures a set of rules/algorithms that operate on 3-D objects. Rules fall into two categories: action and property rules. In the simulation layer, the student is allowed, by using the virtual system, to stroll throughout the Physics laboratory in light of a walking model. Student gets to a simulation region to do an experiment through the detection of mathematical collision. From software engineering perspective, the proposed system facilitates the Physics experiment through making the specification of its applicable parts more modular and reusable. Moreover, a major pedagogical objective is achieved by permitting the student tuning parameters, fixing component of a device then visualizing outputs. This provides student well interpretation by viewing how distinct parameters affect the outcomes of the experiment. With the objective of student performance measuring, we utilized an exploratory group relying upon pre- and post-testing. The application results demonstrate that the simulator contributes positively to student performance in regard to practical Physics.

This review reports on the current state and the potential of tools and systems designed to aid online searching, referred to here as online searching aids. Intermediary mechanisms are examined in terms of the two stage model, i.e. end‐user, intermediary, ‘raw database’, and different forms of user — system interaction are discussed. The evolution of the terminology of online searching aids is presented with special emphasis on the expert/non‐expert division. Terms defined include gateways, front‐end systems, intermediary systems and post‐processing. The alternative configurations that such systems can have and the approaches to the design of the user interface are discussed. The review then analyses the functions of online searching aids, i.e. logon procedures, access to hosts, help features, search formulation, query reformulation, database selection, uploading, downloading and post‐processing. Costs are then briefly examined. The review concludes by looking at future trends following recent developments in computer science and elsewhere. Distributed expert based information systems (debis), the standard generalised mark‐up language (SGML), the client‐server model, object‐orientation and parallel processing are expected to influence, if they have not done so already, the design and implementation of future online searching aids.

The purpose of this paper is to study how contact centre employees rationalize the perceived problems of an open plan contact centre environment.

The paper applies a framework of four different orientations towards the working environment: the object orientation, system orientation, people orientation and territory orientation. Interviews in three contact centre environments with 28 interviewees were carried out, in order to test whether the framework could be used to analyse the ways the contact centre employees rationalize their working environment. The data were analysed with a qualitative content analysis.

It was possible to find four ways to rationalize the working environment from the speech of the contact centre employees: object‐oriented, system‐oriented, people‐oriented and territory‐oriented rationalization. Persons with the same dominant way of rationalization had internally coherent ways of constructing the reality of their workplace and a common way to justify the existing spatial solutions.

This research is limited to the insights of 28 contact centre workers. Their experiences of their working environment were studied without an attempt to objectively assess whether the problems they named were real or not. The results are not generalizable in the traditional statistical sense.

The research on workplace‐related issues in a contact centre context is limited. Contact centre work is demanding but the physical working environment can be used to minimize the negative consequences of these demands. Thus, it is important to raise understanding of the workplace‐related issues in a contact centre context.

Clinical supervision is a crucial workplace practice for professional learning and development. Research is needed to investigate in detail what happens in supervision to understand how this practice contributes to learning. This paper aims to examine how professionals work with knowledge and navigate epistemic challenges in working with problems of practice.

Three pairs of psychologists audio-recorded five consecutive supervision sessions and were interviewed twice during that time. Analysis considered supervision as a site of emergent learning, focusing on what was discussed and how problems were worked on, whether as epistemic objects (open-ended, aimed at generating new insights) or by using an approach to knowledge objects that focused more directly on what to do next.

One pair consistently adopted an epistemic object approach, while another was consistently more action-oriented, focused on knowledge objects. The third pair used both approaches, sometimes expanding the object with a view to gaining insight and understanding, while at other times focusing on next steps and future action.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to study clinical supervision in terms of how knowledge work is done. Foregrounding the epistemic dimensions of supervision, it reveals previously unexplored but consequential differences in how knowledge is worked with and produced as supervisory pairs discuss complex issues of practice.

The purpose of this study is to provide a method for designing the software for a process control system that avoids difficulties that lead to safety problems.

Design of real-time software for safety critical programmable equipment systems (PES) such as process control or shutdown systems needs to be approached quite differently compared to any other software. It must be designed by those who understand the equipment system not by software engineers who do not. Following the ‘Piper Alpha’ disaster in the North Sea in the late 1980s, it was realised that the software of safety critical PES, such as the shut-down system on an oil rig, was proving very unreliable. Earlier hardwired relay-based shut-down systems were designed by process control engineers who understood the functions the equipment was required to perform; however, by the 1980s, such systems had been replaced by PES designed by system analysts who did not understand the technologies involved. The safety critical real-time software for a programmable equipment system will only be reliable when it is designed by control engineers who understand the functions it has to perform.

Bottom-up design of software is necessary to avoid safety issues and this can only be achieved using object-oriented methods.

This paper describes an entirely original idea of the author based on experience of managing the design and construction of the process control, emergency shut-down and fire and gas and communication systems for a major oil and gas platform in the North Sea around the time of the Piper Alpha disaster.

This paper presents the architecture for a new finite element program written in the C⁺⁺ programming language. A powerful command interpreter allows the user not only to introduce data, but also to define the algorithms that will treat this data to obtain the desired results. In this way, the program can be very easily configured to new computational strategies. By following an object‐oriented programming technique, we expect the program would not fall into the “stagnation” state that affects large finite element codes currently in use.

The process of creating complex models often requires different modelling methods and tools to be integrated. This paper provides a concise description of an object‐oriented environment for creating composite models. The proposed approach is based on using simulation abstractions as basic model building blocks. The basic environment is built up of a Prolog interpreter, SIMLIB and object‐oriented Petri nets.