About this product: Is it impossible to schedule enough time to include users in your design process? Is it difficult to incorporate elaborate user-centered design techniques into your own standard design practices? Do the resources needed seem overwhelming?
This handbook introduces Rapid CD, a fast-paced, adaptive form of Contextual Design. Rapid CD is a hands-on guide for anyone who needs practical guidance on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines and resources.
Rapid Contextual Design provides detailed suggestions on structuring the project and customer interviews, conducting interviews, and running interpretation sessions. The handbook walks you step-by-step through organizing the data so you can see your key issues, along with visioning new solutions, storyboarding to work out the details, and paper prototype interviewing to iterate the design-all with as little as a two-person team with only a few weeks to spare!
*Includes real project examples with actual customer data that illustrate how a CD project actually works. *Covers the entire scope of a project, from deciding on the number and type of interviews, to interview set up and analyzing collected data. Sample project schedules are also included for a variety of different types of projects. *Provides examples of how-to write affinity notes and affinity labels, build an affinity diagram, and step-by-step instructions for consolidating sequence models. *Shows how to use consolidated data to define a design within tight time frames with examples of visions, storyboards, and paper prototypes. *Introduces CDToolsT, the first application designed to support customer-centered design.
About this product: There's certainly no shortage of software design methods: most demand total allegiance, and many claim to be the only true way to delivering useful and maintainable software systems in a timely manner. Contextual Design describes another worthwhile software engineering method, one that places the user (or customer) at the forefront of the software design process from beginning to end. This method seems to be a particularly worthwhile addition to the literature.
Contextual Design begins with contextual inquiry, where software developers interview users and attempt to understand the way they work. Such "customer empathy" is central to the Contextual Design process and a total understanding of "work" within organizations is the mantra here. The book describes how, later in the process, software developers step back from the user data and do an "affinity," which is an overall analysis of hundreds (or even thousands) of individual facts. Contextual Design then explains the additional steps required to build systems using this method, including building models for flow, sequence, and artifacts, and establishing the cultural and the physical environments for a system. After getting an overview, developers consolidate these initial models, get more user input, and then design user interfaces.
This book, written in a clear, informal style without excessive jargon, reads very much like a book on business motivation. Various practitioners of Contextual Design offer short testimonials on the software design method.
About this product: "There is no such thing as theology, there is only contextual theology". So states the author, Stephen Bevans.
Everything, every thought, every belief and creed must be set in context. You, your faith and your expression of faith is as much North American faith as it is Christian faith.
If you are familiar with H. Richard Niebuhr's "Christ and Culture", you will see how Bevans presents six new models that are more relevant to the time in which we live. Though the book was originally printed in 1992, with five models (Translation, Anthropological, Praxis, Synthetic and Transcendental), this second editions has added a new "Counter-cultural" model.
Models are like a GPS, they orient you. They help to define where you are in relation to the world that you live in. Thus, when you can get your bearings you can then plot the course where you need to go.
For Bevans, faith, and everything it embraces, must be seen through context. You, me and all human beings are products of our culture and context. Our understanding of God is a product of Western, European context. Scripture is written in a context, for a context, and from a historical context (See Lucien Legrand's "The Bible on Culture".).
The role of the theologian, minister and everyday Christian is to articulate God to a society that is on the other side of the God experience. The models that Bevans offers can help. His six models allow you to select a vantage point, or rather a platform from which to speak to the world today.
Bevans has done a great service for those seeking to understand their Christian faith in a postmodern world. Strongly Recommended
About this product: Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, PA. Presentation of the author's model and application of the contextual theory of family therapy developed by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy. For psychotherapists.
About this product: This volume reviews the challenges and alternative approaches to modeling how individuals change across time and provides methodologies and data analytic strategies for behavioral and social science researchers. This accessible guide provides concrete, clear examples of how contextual factors can be included in most research studies. Each chapter can be understood independently, allowing readers to first focus on areas most relevant to their work. The opening chapter demonstrates the various ways contextual factors are represented—as covariates, predictors, outcomes, moderators, mediators, or mediated effects. Succeeding chapters review best practice techniques for treating missing data, making model comparisons, and scaling across developmental age ranges. Other chapters focus on specific statistical techniques such as multilevel modeling and multiple-group and multilevel SEM, and how to incorporate tests of mediation, moderation, and moderated mediation. Critical measurement and theoretical issues are discussed, particularly how age can be represented and the ways in which context can be conceptualized. The final chapter provides a compelling call to include contextual factors in theorizing and research.
This book will appeal to researchers and advanced students conducting developmental, social, clinical, or educational research, as well as those in related areas such as psychology and linguistics.
About this product: One of the most exciting recent developments in theology has been an unprecedented interest in the person and work of the Holy Spirit. In fact, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen describes this phenome
About this product: This brief clinical guide de-mystifies Contextual Theory of family counseling for practitioners and students in language that is succinct and lucid. Contextual Family Therapy is a profound, far-reaching approach that offers a comprehensive theory of integrating and balancing the concerns of individuality and togetherness. This book is written to expose a whole new generation of therapists to this important approach to family therapy. In making the volume short and accessible, the goal is not to re-write the work of the past but rather to give the reader the basis to see the power of the approach and give the foundation to understand the existing clinical guides. Through detailing and examining the four interplaying dimensions of relationships-objectifiable facts, individual psychology, systemic interactions, and relational ethics-Contextual Theory gives therapists the ability to reshape human relationships and solve problems using the strengths of trust, fairness, and freedom.
About this product: This unique sociohistorical account of family studies traces the development of various theories or methods within the context of the social values, technological changes, and political events of the twentieth century. Each chapter discusses the origins of a particular theory or method, its core assuptions, its applications, and its link to preceeding and succeeding theories or methods.
About this product: The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in the volume has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modeling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behavior. It shows that 'context matters' in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. By showcasing scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account.
BOOK
