Systems of representation: a pedagogical model for design education in the information age

Abstract

The course SDR: Sistemas de Representación(Systems of Representation), is the last stage of a line of work which has the objective of integrating information technologies in the education of architecture in a meaningful way. A distinctive mark of this pedagogic approach has been to look upon computer technology as an opportunity to rethink the methods, contents and goals of architecturaleducation,in thelight of contemporary culture.

The course is structured in six themes, each one standing for a ‘system of representation’: ‘text’, ‘figure’, ‘object’, ‘image’, ‘space’ and ‘light’. Within every system, a variety of issues dealing with the concept of ‘representation’ are addressed in an interdisciplinary manner. It is a compulsory course lasting three semesters, in the second and third year of a five-year architectural program. It has been offered since the academic year 1999/2000.     

Artist Space

Abstract

This paper addresses the process of patterning reconfigurable video narrative using architectural theory, through a case-study of practice-based research on the interactive, reconfigurable small-screen movie Gormenghast Explore. It focuses on the topography of cinematic narrative as architectural construction, refashioning Kevin Lynch's urban categories and Christian Norberg-Schulz's concept of place to support a design ontology for dramatic fictive narrativity. This architectural framework provides an effective representation for both navigable narrative content and 3D environment and interface.     

House of Affects—time,immersion and play in digital design for spatially-experienced interactive narrative

Abstract

Philosophers and architects have beeninvestigating how human presence is integrated into ‘constructed realities’for many years. Architects now need tolook to cinema for ways of connecting disparate spaces and relating them through movement, and in time. Framing interactive experience with the help of Stanislavskian categories and building story-blocks into games, brings narrative, dramatic and emotional‘added value’ to the process of immersion in cinematic fiction. By prototyping an easily-adaptable modelof architecture for audiovisualspace, the experimental project House of Affects aims to create a matrix of construction for spaces for cinematic interactive experience.     

Past and future of software architectural decisions – A systematic mapping study

ContextThe software architecture of a system is the result of a set of architectural decisions. The topic of architectural decisions in software engineering has received significant attention in recent years. However, no systematic overview exists on the state of research on architectural decisions.ObjectiveThe goal of this study is to provide a systematic overview of the state of research on architectural decisions. Such an overview helps researchers reflect on previous research and plan future research. Furthermore, such an overview helps practitioners understand the state of research, and how research results can help practitioners in their architectural decision-making.MethodWe conducted a systematic mapping study, covering studies published between January 2002 and January 2012. We defined six research questions. We queried six reference databases and obtained an initial result set of 28,895 papers. We followed a search and filtering process that resulted in 144 relevant papers.ResultsAfter classifying the 144 relevant papers for each research question, we found that current research focuses on documenting architectural decisions. We found that only several studies describe architectural decisions from the industry. We identified potential future research topics: domain-specific architectural decisions (such as mobile), achieving specific quality attributes (such as reliability or scalability), uncertainty in decision-making, and group architectural decisions. Regarding empirical evaluations of the papers, around half of the papers use systematic empirical evaluation approaches (such as surveys, or case studies). Still, few papers on architectural decisions use experiments.ConclusionOur study confirms the increasing interest in the topic of architectural decisions. This study helps the community reflect on the past ten years of research on architectural decisions. Researchers are offered a number of promising future research directions, while practitioners learn what existing papers offer.     

How have we evaluated software pattern application? A systematic mapping study of research design practices

ContextSoftware patterns encapsulate expert knowledge for constructing successful solutions to recurring problems. Although a large collection of software patterns is available in literature, empirical evidence on how well various patterns help in problem solving is limited and inconclusive. The context of these empirical findings is also not well understood, limiting applicability and generalizability of the findings.ObjectiveTo characterize the research design of empirical studies exploring software pattern application involving human participants.MethodWe conducted a systematic mapping study to identify and analyze 30 primary empirical studies on software pattern application, including 24 original studies and 6 replications. We characterize the research design in terms of the questions researchers have explored and the context of empirical research efforts. We also classify the studies in terms of measures used for evaluation, and threats to validity considered during study design and execution.ResultsUse of software patterns in maintenance is the most commonly investigated theme, explored in 16 studies. Object-oriented design patterns are evaluated in 14 studies while 4 studies evaluate architectural patterns. We identified 10 different constructs with 31 associated measures used to evaluate software patterns. Measures for ‘efficiency’ and ‘usability’ are commonly used to evaluate the problem solving process. While measures for ‘completeness’, ‘correctness’ and ‘quality’ are commonly used to evaluate the final artifact. Overall, ‘time to complete a task’ is the most frequently used measure, employed in 15 studies to measure ‘efficiency’. For qualitative measures, studies do not report approaches for minimizing biases 27% of the time. Nine studies do not discuss any threats to validity.ConclusionSubtle differences in study design and execution can limit comparison of findings. Establishing baselines for participants’ experience level, providing appropriate training, standardizing problem sets, and employing commonly used measures to evaluate performance can support replication and comparison of results across studies.     

Do we need sustainability as a new approach in human factors and ergonomics?

The International Ergonomics Association Technical Committee ‘Human Factors and Sustainable Development’ was established to contribute to a broad discourse about opportunities and risks resulting from current societal ‘mega-trends’ and their impacts on the interactions among humans and other elements of a system, e.g. in work systems. This paper focuses on the underlying key issues: how do the sustainability paradigm and human factors/ergonomics interplay and interact, and is sustainability necessary as a new approach for our discipline? Based on a discussion of the sustainability concept, some general principles for designing new and enhancing existent approaches of human factors and ergonomics regarding their orientation towards sustainability are proposed.

Practitioner summary: The increasing profile of sustainability on the international stage presents new opportunities for human factors/ergonomics. Positioning of the sustainability paradigm within human factors/ergonomics is discussed. Approaches to incorporating sustainability in the design of work systems are considered.     

Designing infrastructures for creative engagement

Abstract

As museums extend their scope beyond traditional exhibition spaces and into everyday practices and institutions, it is necessary to develop suitable conceptualisations of how technology can be understood and designed. To this end, I propose the concept of infrastructures, as both social and material, as a useful frame for discussing important challenges and opportunities in terms of designing for audience engagement. I further argue that when designing infrastructures, an important challenge is to develop the social aspects of infrastructures in terms of creating, maintaining and developing relationships between organisations and communities. I argue that this is as much an object of design as technical interactive systems and discuss the relational work undertaken in this activity. The ideas of infrastructure and relational work is illustrated through a case describing the design of a system for cultural heritage engagement for Danevirke museum covering issues relating to the Danish minority in northern Germany.     

The design of civic technology: factors that influence public participation and impact

Civic technology needs to be better understood in terms of the factors that promote representative public participation and impact. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of a civic tech platform that enabled the public to provide feedback on public transport to the service providers. The overall aim of this research was to investigate the public’s use of a leading civic tech platform, FixMyTransport. The key findings were that: an effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables broad participation; data and process complexity need to be removed; factual information can be captured in situ with impacts, consequences and opinions added later; emotions (if important) need to be explicitly elicited; feedback to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is important for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a community. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms.

Practitioner Summary: There is a lack of understanding of how ‘civic tech’ platforms are used and how they may be designed for maximum effectiveness. Multiple data collection methods were used to investigate a well-developed example of civic tech. Effective civic tech can enable broad democratic participation to improve public services.     

From needs to aspirations in information technology for development

ABSTRACT

“Needs” figure prominently both in the technology sector and in international development. Both fields refer frequently to people’s needs and perform needs assessments. But, the two groups differ on what needs are. The technologist’s conception is represented in such statements as, “the user needs to see shoes in various colors on an e-commerce website.” Development focuses on more basic needs such as nutrition, health, and employment. We argue that conflating these two classes of needs is a subtle but underlying cause of myopic technological interventions. While development is increasingly understood to require changes in human capital, institutional capacity, and mass values – traits internal to people and societies – the technologist’s conception of needs suggests solutions that change external context through technological artifacts. We propose an approach to ICT and development that is focused less on needs, and more on aspirations. We rationalize aspirations as a basis for action, and present preliminary evidence in the form of a survey and three brief case studies for the viability of aspiration-based approaches to development.     

Touch as techne: rethinking digitality

Abstract

This article introduces Pulse Project (2011–), a doctoral performance research project that engages in critical discourse between art and science through the creation of digital soundscapes that weave together artistic, medical, technological, ancient and modern methodologies. Pulse ‘reading’, case histories, notations of pulses and programming soundscape compositions are all used together as methods for exploring the cultural encounter between artist, participants and diverse medical practices. Pulse Project seeks to provide an examination of the means with which the temporal materiality of touch can be used together with audio programming to form a translation and synthesis of different ecologies and disciplines, e.g. medicine and art, Eastern and Western practices, touch and digitality, etc. Drawing upon my experience as a clinical acupuncturist (with training in biomedicine), I use Chinese pulse diagnostics together with SuperCollider (an audio synthesis programming language) to inform the composition process of each soundscape. In this way, Pulse Project interrogates the aesthetic and philosophical axioms underpinning contemporary medicine, technology and cognitive embodiment through the exploration of their corollary ‘others’—traditional Chinese medicine and music theory—in order to generate a fresh approach to embodiment and soundscape composition.     

Literacy and Scientific Literacy: A Response to Fensham

Abstract

Fensham (2002) criticizes scientific literacy curricula designed by scientists and science educators as ‘inadequately clear and hopelessly unrealistic.’ There is, however, good reason to believe that other groups are as likely to produce inadequate curricula as scientists and science educators, since the process for producing a curriculum is at least as responsible for Fensham's impasse as are the participants. Fensham mentions, but does not explore, an analogy between literacy in its prototypical form—reading and writing—and scientific literacy. An analysis of literacy leads to several propositions, from which the analogy with scientific literacy can be drawn. Literacy in its prototypical form focuses on the tools of reading and writing. Striking parallels between the two forms of literacy provide strong support for considering scientific literacy in relation to its tools, that is, explaining and predicting, rather than to a body of knowledge.     

3-D breast anthropometry of plus-sized women in South Africa

Exploratory retail studies in South Africa indicate that plus-sized women experience problems and dissatisfaction with poorly fitting bras. The lack of 3-D anthropometric studies for the plus-size women's bra market initiated this research. 3-D body torso measurements were collected from a convenience sample of 176 plus-sized women in South Africa. 3-D breast measurements extracted from the TC² NX12–3-D body scanner ‘breast module’ software were compared with traditional tape measurements. Regression equations show that the two methods of measurement were highly correlated although, on average, the bra cup size determining factor ‘bust minus underbust’ obtained from the 3-D method is approximately 11% smaller than that of the manual method. It was concluded that the total bust volume correlated with the quadrant volume (r = 0.81), cup length, bust length and bust prominence, should be selected as the overall measure of bust size and not the traditional bust girth and the underbust measurement.

Statement of Relevance: This study contributes new data and adds to the knowledge base of anthropometry and consumer ergonomics on bra fit and support, published in this, the Ergonomics Journal, by Chen et al. (2010) on bra fit and White et al. (2009) on breast support during overground running.     

Survival suit volume reduction associated with immersion: implications for buoyancy estimation in offshore workers of different size

Abstract

Rationale: It is currently unknown how body size affects buoyancy in submerged helicopter escape. Method: Eight healthy males aged 39.6 ± 12.6 year (mean ± SD) with BMI 22.0–40.0 kg m^?2 wearing a standard survival (‘dry’) suit undertook a normal venting manoeuvre and underwent 3D scanning to assess body volume (wearing the suit) before and after immersion in a swimming pool. Results: Immersion-induced volume loss averaged 14.4 ± 5.4 l, decreased with increasing dry density (mass volume^?1) and theoretical buoyant force in 588 UK offshore workers was found to be 264 ± 46 and 232 ± 60 N using linear and power functions, respectively. Both approaches revealed heavier workers to have greater buoyant force. Discussion: While a larger sample may yield a more accurate buoyancy prediction, this study shows heavier workers are likely to have greater buoyancy. Without free-swimming capability to overcome such buoyancy, some individuals may possibly exceed the safe limit to enable escape from a submerged helicopter.

Practitioner Summary: Air expulsion reduced total body volume of survival-suited volunteers following immersion by an amount inversely proportional to body size. When applied to 588 offshore workers, the predicted air loss suggested buoyant force to be greatest in the heaviest individuals, which may impede their ability to exit a submerged helicopter.     

Exploring design trade-offs for achieving social inclusion in multi-tiered design problems

ABSTRACT

The digital age of the future is ‘not out there to be discovered’, but it needs to be ‘designed’. The design challenge has to address questions about how we want to live, work, and learn (as individuals and as communities) and what we value and appreciate, e.g.: reflecting on quality of life and creating inclusive societies. An overriding design trade-off for the digital age is whether new developments will increase the digital divide or will create more inclusive societies. Sustaining inclusive societies means allowing people of all ages and all abilities to exploit information technologies for personally meaningful activities. Meta-design fosters the design of socio-technical environments that end-user developers can modify and evolve at use time to improve their quality of life and favour their inclusion in the society. This paper describes three case studies in the domain of assistive technologies in which end users themselves cannot act as end-user developers, but someone else (e.g.: a caregiver or a clinician) must accept this role requiring multi-tiered architectures. The design trade-offs and requirements for meta-design identified in the context of the case studies and other researchers’ projects are described to inform the development of future socio-technical environments focused on social inclusion.     

The virtues and the vertigo of the virtual

From ‘virtual worlds’ to ‘artificial realities’, from ‘cyberspace’ to ‘multisensory sythetic environments’, there is no lack of colourful expressions to describe one of the most recent and the most promising developments of computer graphics. Indeed, this is a radically new tool for representing the world, capable of permanently changing our way of looking at things and the way we work, as well as the familiar concept of a show. What is the definition of a ‘virtual environment’? It is an artificial space, visualized through techniques of synthetic imagery, and in which we can ‘physically’ move about. This impression of ‘physical movement’ is produced by the concurrence of two sensory stimuli, one based on fully stereoscopic vision and the other on the so-called ‘proprioceptive’ sensation of muscular correlation between real bodily movements and apparent changes in the artificial space in which we are ‘immersed’.     

Beyond multi-adjoint logic programming

In ‘multi-adjoint logic programming’, MALP in brief, each fuzzy logic program is associated with its own ‘multi-adjoint lattice’ for modelling truth degrees beyond the simpler case of true and false, where a large set of fuzzy connectives can be defined. On this wide repertoire, it is crucial to connect each implication symbol with a proper conjunction thus conforming constructs of the form (←_i, &_i) called ‘adjoint pairs’, whose use directly affects both declarative and operational semantics of the MALP framework. In this work, we firstly show how the strong dependence of adjoint pairs can be largely weakened for an interesting ‘sub-class’ of MALP programs. Then, we reason in a similar way till conceiving a ‘super-class’ of fuzzy logic programs beyond MALP, which definitively drops out the need for using adjoint pairs, since the new semantics behaviour relies on much more relaxed lattices than multi-adjoint ones.     

Classification and Concept Consistency

Abstract

This article investigates the extent to which undergraduates consistently use a single mechanism as a basis for classifying mathematical objects. We argue that the concept image/concept definition distinction focuses on whether students use an accepted definition but does not necessarily capture the more basic notion that there should be a fixed basis for classification. We examine students’ classifications of real sequences before and after exposure to definitions of increasing and decreasing; we develop an abductive plausible explanations method to estimate the consistency within the participants’ responses and suggest that this provides evidence that many students may lack what we call concept consistency.     

The Ergonomics Society ANNUAL CONFERENCE 1978 ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS

As part of a combined electromyographic, mechanical work and metabolic study of load carriage this research focuses on the optimal load carried by the subject. This study demonstrates the anomalies associated with the definition of optimal load, and shows that it is dependent on whether or not the carrier is given any credit for carrying his own weight as well as that of the load.

In many situations it may be important to include the carrier's own body mass in the optimal load equation. This study showed that if the load were body plus backpack the optimal backpack load was found to be quite low (less than 10kg) because the metabolic cosi increased quite rapidly at low loads. On the other hand, if the carrier's mass was ignored there might be an optimum load at 40 kg or higher. Giving partial ‘credit’ for carrying body weight (for example, 50% body mass plus backpack), resulted in an optimum load of about 17 kg. The percentage ‘credit’ given to the body mass itself depends on how important it is that the carrier does not arrive fatigued at his destination. The military may wish to give 100% credit, and recreational carriers zero.     

Body composition and self-perceived health and fitness among indoor sports participants

Abstract

This paper examines (1) the responses of participants in specific indoor sports to questions regarding their self-perceived health and fitness, and (2) the relation betweeen these responses and body composition. A representative sample of indoor sports participants (n = 4308; 2938 male and 1370 female) from six cities in the United Kingdom responded to a questionnaire concerned with their self-perception of health and fitness. Height and weight was established from self-report and a body mass index (BMI) was calculated. Seventy eight percent of males and 85% of females reported their health as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. Less than 2% of the sample reported their health as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. However, only 67% of males and 67% of females reported their fitness as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. Again, the proportion of the sample reporting ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ fitness was low; less than 4%. The question on health was compared with a recent general population survey and this yielded markedly more ‘unfavourable’ results; only 72% of males and 70% of females reported their health as being ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. A comparison of the response category groups for BMI showed significant differences between the ‘poor’ and ‘fair’ groups but not between the ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ groups.

It is concluded that: (1) indoor sports participants regard their health and fitness highly, but their fitness less so than their health; (2) adiposity tends to be associated with poorer perceptions of health and fitness; (3) women sports participants perceive their health more highly than others of the same age compared with men, yet the reverse is true of fitness.