In this article, we explore participation in Participatory Design and User-Centered Design, highlighting that participation should not be underestimated because of the inherent differences in approaches and activities that can influence active or passive user participation. Our analysis focuses on three key aspects: (1) Participant Activity and Passivity, we analyse how assigned activities and responsibilities may determine whether participants are active or passive in the process. (2) Complexities of Mixing Approaches, we discuss the difficulties that arise when combining different approaches, leading to an understanding of the distinction between involving and consulting the user. And (3) Digitising Processes, we examine the implications of moving processes from both approaches to the digital environment. Throughout our reflections, we illustrate how these factors affect participation and propose ideas to encourage continued reflection rather than conclude the discussion. This critique aims to provide a deeper insight into participation in Participatory Design and User-Centered Design, and to promote constructive dialogue on their effective implementation.

The integration of augmented reality (AR) into educational environments will depend on its perceived effectiveness in enhancing teaching practices and the attitudes toward the use of this technology. Therefore, the main objective is to investigate the teachers’ attitude and motivation to adopt AR in educational settings, which also looks at a cross-cultural context. Furthermore, this research reveals different aspects that have an impact on teachers’ attitudes toward adopting AR in the teaching process. To investigate this, we conducted a study with 87 K-12 teachers belonging to two different education systems, i.e., Sweden and Palestine. The mixed-methods approach enhances the validity of the study and provides a broad under-standing through numerical data, while qualitative insights offer deeper explanations of the findings. The results indicate a statistically significant difference in teachers’ attitudes about AR, with a mean 3.99 for teachers coming from Palestine showing a more positive attitude towards AR-supported learning. Therefore, it is important for educational institutions and application developers to consider a range of learning and teaching methods, as well as spe-cific needs, throughout the process of developing and incorporating AR into the curriculum.

Data-driven solutions are becoming essential to modern business models, changing traditional business practices and complex value chains in multi-stakeholder and community-based sectors such as agriculture and forestry. Nevertheless, there is a lack of consolidated knowledge about the benefits and challenges that data-driven community-based business models may present in these domains. This study conducts a systematic literature review of scientific publications to identify the benefits and barriers that community-based business models for agriculture and forestry data ecosystems present. The articles included are in English and peer-reviewed and were published between 2014 to 2024. The search was conducted in Scopus, Web of Science, and IEEE Xplore, and the query resulted in 387 studies. This review has followed the PRISMA methodology, and the final number of reviewed papers was 51. Ultimately, it is found that the benefits outweigh the barriers in terms of their repetition across the literature. Significant benefits identified are interconnectedness and interactivity, resource availability, and multidirectional knowledge transfer, while the high cost of implementation and the complexity of integration and implementation of data-driven community-based business models are among the major barriers. The findings from this work can bridge the existing gap of attention to data-driven community-based business models in agriculture and forestry, help with future research work, and act as guidelines for implementing such business models.

This study explores diverse perspectives on the digital divide from the stakeholders’ viewpoints. The study collected data during a workshop on the digital divide, which involved 34 participants, including politicians, civil servants, and bank officers. The collected data was analyzed using a rich picture technique. The results showed a broad consensus that society forces individuals to adopt digital technologies. Moreover, the study found that there is a prevailing expectation for individuals to take responsibility for bridging the digital divide by pursuing further education in digital skills. This research contributes to the understanding of the diverse perspectives of stakeholders regarding the digital divide.

Students' feedback is an essential part of the teaching-learning process and serves as an effective instrument for continuous improvement in educational environments. The insights gathered from students' experiences and perceptions expressed in reviews provide instructors with a valuable resource to enhance their teaching methods, instructional design, and overall classroom dynamics. However, students' reviews are often unclear, contradictory, and conflicting with each other, making their interpretation and use challenging. Therefore, this study proposes a novel deep learning-based approach that helps course designers and instructors effectively identify constructive and useful reviews. The approach leverages the integration of several attributes, including textual review, student satisfaction, meta-data of the course, and review-derived information such as sentiment, readability, and review depth. The approach is tested on a real-life dataset comprising 38,717 reviews gathered from the Coursera learning platform for the purpose of this study. The experimental results, with an F1-score of 0.91, suggest that the approach can be an effective tool for educators and instructional designers to identify helpful student reviews.

The digital product passport has been introduced as a policy instrument to enable traceability throughout the product life cycle and to support a circular economy. Anyhow, as a relatively new concept, there are a lot of uncertainties throughout the industrial landscape regarding the challenges and opportunities it brings. One such branch of industry is the furniture sector. In this paper, we present a DPP solution for furniture industry based on blockchain technology and inspired by a design thinking mindset. Through a prototype implementation, we highlight the key aspects such as data governance, stakeholder constellation, data interoperability, and data integrity that have significant research potential. Furthermore, we discuss these key concepts of DPP through the lens of eco-design principles in order to promote sustainability, improve energy efficiency, and protect the environment.

This paper looks at the incorporation of blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into Forest 4.0, a sector that harnesses advanced tools such as artificial intelligence and big data for efficient and sustainable forest monitoring and management. The synergy of blockchain and IoT has gained significant attention, offering a secure and decentralized framework for data management, traceability, and supply chain oversight. The provided use cases demonstrate how these technologies improve forest practices, with insight into smart contract implementation and decentralized systems for sustainable forest management. The major findings imply that digital technologies such as blockchain, IoT, AI, WSNs, etc. can help improve forest management sustainability, efficiency and transparency, and integration of these technologies can provide significant information for decision-making and resource allocation, as well as improve supply chain transparency and sustainable forest practices.

In the evolving landscape of e-commerce, personalizing user experience through recommendation systems has become a way to boost user satisfaction and engagement. However, small-scale e-commerce platforms struggle with significant challenges, including data sparsity and user anonymity. These issues make it hard to effectively implement recommendation systems, resulting in difficulty in recommending the right products to users. This study introduces an innovative Hybrid Recommendation System (HRS) to address challenges in e-commerce personalization caused by data sparsity and user anonymity. By blending multiple dimensions of the data into one unified system for producing recommendations, this system represents a notable advancement in web engineering for achieving personalized user experiences in the context of limited data. This research emphasizes the significance of innovative and tech-driven solutions in transforming small-scale e-commerce platforms, providing direction for future research and development in the field.

This article presents a systematic literature review on hybrid recommendation systems (HRS) in the e-commerce sector, a field characterized by constant innovation and rapid growth. As the complexity and volume of digital data increases, recommendation systems have become essential in guiding customers to services or products that align with their interests. However, the effectiveness of single-architecture recommendation algorithms is often limited by issues such as data sparsity, challenges in understanding user needs, and the cold start problem. Hybridization, which combines multiple algorithms in different methods, has emerged as a dominant solution to these limitations. This approach is utilized in various domains, including e-commerce, where it significantly improves user experience and sales. To capture the recent trends and advancements in HRS within e-commerce over the past six years, we review the state-of-the-art overview of HRS within e-commerce. This review meticulously evaluates existing research, addressing primary inquiries and presenting findings that contribute to evidence-based decision-making, understanding research gaps, and maintaining transparency. The review begins by establishing fundamental concepts, followed by detailed methodologies, findings from addressing the research questions, and exploration of critical aspects of HRS. In summarizing and incorporating existing research, this paper offers valuable insights for researchers and outlines potential avenues for future research, ultimately providing a comprehensive overview of the current state and prospects of HRS in e-commerce.

Participatory Design and User-Centered Design are two approaches commonly used when designing solutions. Both approaches involve users, albeit to a different degree across different phases of the design process. The recent shift enforced by COVID-19, brought the need that more activities are expected to be conducted online. In these circumstances, there are adaptation challenges in both approaches, especially for the Participatory Design. Technology mediation in the activities in both approaches brings overhead that makes the changes between them less obvious. Thus, in this paper we bring up for discussion a discourse of hybridization of these approaches as a way forward for online and distributed design processes. Furthermore, we present our initial thoughts regarding the possibilities that this might bring.