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Specializing online health communities for autism parents in Turkey
This thesis explores the support seeking practices of parents who have children on the autism spectrum ("autism parents") with a transformative agenda. Autism parents face familial, social, psychological and financial challenges more than their peers who have children with typical development. Possible causes of these challenges include insufficient services for the child and the family, financial and career adjustments needed in order to provide care and education to the child, and the society's lacking understanding of autism. These challenges manifest themselves even stronger in countries like Turkey, where parents manage and navigate excessive uncertainty on a daily basis due to the inadequacy of the state-based services and the dominance of the medical discourse around disability. Many parents turn to online support spaces (e.g. social media groups) to cope with these uncertainties, however the effectiveness of such spaces is questionable. The aim of the thesis is, therefore, to investigate the online and offline support seeking practices of autism parents, and to inform the design of online tools that can better accommodate their practices. These issues were explored throughout a mixed-method design ethnographic research, which revealed how autism parents seek and share support offline and online as well as the shortcomings of the online platforms in Turkey in accommodating autism parents' experiences. Findings from the design ethnography generated design implications for online health communities for parents, and these implications were compared with the literature following a systematic literature review on the design of online health communities. The systematic review also consolidated the design knowledge produced by HCI researchers (the field of Human-Computer Interaction) on the exchange of support in online health and caregiver communities. The primary contributions of this work are: (1) a design ethnographic account of autism parenthood in Turkey, (2) a consolidation of design knowledge produced on online health communities, and (3) implications for designing online communities to accommodate the complexity of seeking and sharing informational, emotional and instrumental support for autism parents.
İstanbul'un kültürel ses alanı: Günlük kentsel yaşamın işitsel kültürel mirasını toplama, koruma ve sergileme
This dissertation aims to evaluate the culture and traditions of everyday life from a sonic perspective and suggests ways to protect characteristic sounds and soundscapes, as well as to raise public awareness of urban sounds. This multidisciplinary research project, entitled The Soundscape of Istanbul, is rooted in fields such as soundscape studies, intangible cultural heritage (ICH), museum studies, sensory studies, interaction design and experience design. It explores the larger contemporary cultural soundscape of a metropolitan city, Istanbul. Sounds constitute an inevitable part of daily life and, are therefore very important as ICH. Thus, they deserve to be protected to strengthen cultural memory. However, sonic culture is twice endangered, due to the physical characteristics of sound itself and due to the dynamic structure of intangible culture. Therefore, the protection of contemporary cultural soundscapes in the context of ICH is particularly urgent and crucial for transferring the present sonic environments to following generations in order to maintain a cultural identity. For the purposes of this research project, I defined culturally significant sounds of the city of Istanbul by public participation. Public opinion was very crucial for determining the most significant sounds, since cultural identity is based on individual's cultural memory. Then, I collected the sounds thus determined and created a sound archive, now located in Koç University's Suna Kıraç Library to make it publicly accessible. In order to turn this collection into a more sustainable and richer archive, we designed an interactive platform that is open to contributions so that volunteers can record and upload their own sound recordings. We then designed two exhibitions to increase the public awareness of urban sounds, to introduce this interactive sound archive, and to encourage volunteers to contribute. According to surveys conducted during the exhibitions, visitors have an unconscious emotional bond to sounds, but they generally did not realize this before the exhibitions. During the exhibitions, they became aware of the significance of urban sounds and volunteered to contribute. Thus, the exhibitions played a significant role in raising public awareness and in protecting the sonic heritage, making it live on for future generations.
The effects of interaction design in mobile publishing:Research on newspaper web pages compability to mobile devices
In 21. century information technology is developing day by day. Especially information communication technology are used for sharing feelings and informations by people.Therefore information communication technologies (ICT) are so important for humanity. The major qualification of information communication technologies, especially of mobile ones, is making life easier that all information can be rapidly obtained through different sources. Thanks to the 3G technology, online newspapers have reached readers by mobile devices. In addition, divergent screen sizes, operating capacities, Internet connection speeds, information display styles and interface designs of mobile devices influence the way news is perceived by readers.This dissertation has examined the compatibility of the web pages of newspapers with mobile devices in terms of interaction design. To this end, new communication environments, transformation of communication and interaction design in mobile publishing have been analyzed. In the research section of the study, the experiments made about this issue have been reviewed. Also, mobile communication experts from Hürriyet, Milliyet and Sabah have been interviewed. A survey designed about this issue was published on the Internet. Last of all, in order to observe users? individual experiences with mobile devices, the method of experimental design was implemented with a group of participants. Consequently, the standardization that should be applied to mobile interface design has been specified.