Information Systems Group

The Information Systems group explores two research strands:

-       Information Systems as Service Systems
-       Participatory Media Design                                              

The first of these lines acknowledges the increasing relevance of Services and the impact that these have on information systems. According to (Council of European Parliament, 2006), services account for 70% of GDP and employment in most Member States in the EU. According to (Executive Office of the President of the United States, 2013) service industries account for 68% of U.S. GDP and four out of five U.S. jobs.

It is a natural evolution of the research concerns of the group whose history has seen information systems morph from software engineering projects, to enterprise application integration of a portfolio of COTS, to more recent service-oriented entities. Although grounded on solid technical knowledge, our research puts on equal footing the social and business issues when addressing enterprise architecture, systems design, and governance.

Keywords: Services, service-orientation, service design and management, Internet of Services, cloud, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, business models, business processes, COBIT, ITIL.

The second line of research is positioned in the broader field of Human-Computer Interaction. It has been focused on the design of interactive media supporting online participation, collaboration, and learning. We mostly resort to Design Research and User Research strategies; designing and prototyping interactive contexts supported on participatory media technologies, with a particular focus on multiplayer games as experimental contexts. We focus on technologies for collaboration, creation and learning, and our research concerns include the study of participatory democratic processes through online communities, experience design and evaluation methodologies, creation technologies for digital games, design of dynamic soundscapes, player participation in the creative and design process, and exploitation of playful media in learning and therapeutic contexts. Lately we have been working on a scalable peer-to-peer architecture enabling live editing and gameplay, a linguistic adaptation of the Test of Playfulness, a pattern language for sound design in games, and a model for holistic game design and experience evaluation.

Keywords: Interaction Design, Media Design, Game Design, Gameplay Experience Evaluation, Creativity Support Environments, Serious Games.