The play's the thing

For very understandable reasons phenomenological approaches predominate in the field of sensory urbanism. This paper does not seek to add to that particular discourse. Rather it takes Rorty’s postmodernized Pragmatism as its starting point and develops a position on the role of multi-modal design representation in the design process as a means of admitting many voices and managing multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper will interrogate some of the concepts underpinning the Sensory Urbanism project to help define the scope of interest in multi-modal representations. It will then explore a range of techniques and approaches developed by artists and designers during the past fifty years or so and comment on how they might inform the question of multi-modal representation. In conclusion I will argue that we should develop a heterogeneous tool kit that adopts, adapts and re-invents existing methods because this will better serve our purposes during the exploratory phase(s) of any design project that deals with complexity

The play's the thing

For very understandable reasons phenomenological approaches predominate in the field of sensory urbanism. This paper does not seek to add to that particular discourse. Rather it takes Rorty’s postmodernized Pragmatism as its starting point and develops a position on the role of multi-modal design representation in the design process as a means of admitting many voices and managing multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper will interrogate some of the concepts underpinning the Sensory Urbanism project to help define the scope of interest in multi-modal representations. It will then explore a range of techniques and approaches developed by artists and designers during the past fifty years or so and comment on how they might inform the question of multi-modal representation. In conclusion I will argue that we should develop a heterogeneous tool kit that adopts, adapts and re-invents existing methods because this will better serve our purposes during the exploratory phase(s) of any design project that deals with complexity

Reflections on the use of Project Wonderland as a mixed-reality environment for teaching and learning

This paper reflects on the lessons learnt from MiRTLE?a collaborative research project to create a ?mixed reality teaching and learning environment? that enables teachers and students participating in real-time mixed and online classes to interact with avatar representations of each other. The key hypothesis of the project is that avatar representations of teachers and students can help create a sense of shared presence, engendering a greater sense of community and improving student engagement in online lessons. This paper explores the technology that underpins such environments by presenting work on the use of a massively multi-user game server, based on Sun?s Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland tools, to create a shared teaching environment, illustrating the process by describing the creation of a virtual classroom. It is planned that the MiRTLE platform will be used in several trial applications ? which are described in the paper. These example applications are then used to explore some of the research issues arising from the use of virtual environments within an education environment. The research discussion initially focuses on the plans to assess this within the MiRTLE project. This includes some of the issues of designing virtual environments for teaching and learning, and how supporting pedagogical and social theories can inform this process

Drawing, drafting, designing, and pasting. Human figures (and cameos) in architecture design communication

In architectural drawings, human figures are generally requested to express the scale of design space and to illustrate the functions, but many cases demonstrate they are capable of playing cultural roles, indirectly revealing the architects’ ideological positions toward society. By comparing their use in the work of Otto Wagner, Mies van de Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Mansilla and Tuñón, this article analyses their role as visual mediator between representation and reality according to the different graphical techniques and their intertextual potential to connote the representation and the specific figures adopted. In particular, it focuses on the case of the cameo, and the cameo of the architect in particular, to discuss the semantic consequences on the drawing and to frame it into the wider, pictorial typology of the portrait of an architect

Hybridity on Architecture and Urban Spaces in the Colonial Tin Mining Town of Muntok-Bangka

This paper concerns the importance of socio-cultural hybridity in the process of architecture and urban development. It confronts spatial particularity occurring between the discourses of colonialism and multiculturalism. As a result of centuries of dynamic interaction amongst several ethnic groups including Malay, Chinese and European, Muntok as the colonial capital town of Bangka Island before 20thcentury offers various architectural edifices and urban forms. The scope of this paper focuses on the intersection between colonial history and hybridity itself and the research analyses its material represent through architecture and urban form. The methods of the research are conducted through a combination of a qualitative and a quantitative approach involving direct interviews, data collection, and typological analysis. Hybridity becomes a critical tool to reveal the dynamic process of architecture and urbanism. The research found that hybrid architecture is not only about the existence of physical aspects of buildings, but also most importantly about the integration and dialectical relationship between its materiality and the socio-cultural processes that lie behind it. Keywords: architecture,culture, hybridity, urbanis

Management of fruit species in urban home gardens of Argentina Atlantic Forest as an influence for landscape domestication

Home gardens are considered germplasm repositories and places for experimentation, thus they are key sites for the domestication of plants. Domestication is considered a constant process that occurs along a continuum from wild to managed to domesticated populations. Management may lead to the modification of populations and in other cases to their distribution, changing population structure in a landscape. Our objective is focused on the management received in home gardens by perennial species of fruits. For this, the management practices applied to native and exotic perennial fruits species by a group of 20 women in the periurban zone of Iguazú, Argentina, were analyzed. In-depth interviews were conducted, as well as guided tours for the recognition and collection of specimens of species and ethnovarieties. Sixty-six fruit species managed in the home gardens were recorded. The predominant families are Rutaceae, Myrtaceae, and Rosaceae. The fruit species with the highest number of associated management practices are pitanga (Eugenia uniflora) and pindó (Syagrus rommanzoffiana). The 10 species with the highest management intensity are (in decreasing order of intensity) banana (Musa x paradisiaca), palta (Persea americana), pitanga (E. uniflora), mango (Mangifera indica), cocú (Allophylus edulis), mamón (Carica papaya), guayaba (Psidium guajava), limón mandarina (Citrus x taitensis), güembé (Philodendron bipinnatifidum), and mandarina (Citrus reticulata). Among the families with the greatest modifications in their distribution, abundance and presence of ethnovarieties in domestic gardens, are the native Myrtaceae and the exotic Rutaceae. The main management practices involved are cultivation, tolerance, transplant and enhancement in decreasing order. It can be concluded that in Iguazú, fruit species management shows both in plant germplasm as in environment a continuum that through tolerance, transplant and cultivation latu sensu has derived in a mosaic of species in different management situations, which in turn are representative of an anthropogenic landscape in constant domestication and change.Fil: Furlan, Violeta. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Nordeste. Instituto de Biología Subtropical. Instituto de Biología Subtropical - Nodo Puerto Iguazú | Universidad Nacional de Misiones. Instituto de Biología Subtropical. Instituto de Biología Subtropical - Nodo Puerto Iguazú; Argentina. Centro de Investigaciones del Bosque Atlántico; ArgentinaFil: Pochettino, María Lelia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Laboratorio de Etnobotánica y Botánica Aplicada; ArgentinaFil: Hilgert, Norma Ines. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de la Plata; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Nordeste. Instituto de Biología Subtropical. Instituto de Biología Subtropical - Nodo Puerto Iguazú | Universidad Nacional de Misiones. Instituto de Biología Subtropical. Instituto de Biología Subtropical - Nodo Puerto Iguazú; Argentin

The architectural topographic grain of contingent events: An exploratory 'toponemic' analysis of an interactive narrative

The philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin referred to the prevailing imaginaries of fictional time-space associated with distinctive phases in the development of the novel as their ‘chronotope’. In this paper I argue that the form of the chronotope can be regarded in relational terms as the arrangement of architectural topographic descriptions that prefigure the time-space of narrative possibility. These denotative descriptions are intrinsic to the temporalizing quality of contingency that distinguish particular sequences of action and occurrence as signifying events. An exploratory analysis of the dungeon-cave complex described in the Fantasy Fighting Gamebook (FFG) The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, published in 1982, offers an example of a ludic chronotope in which the player’s navigation of the text defines the gamespace. The interactive format of FFGs facilitates the quantitative examination of the relationship between architectural topographic descriptions and narrative possibilities that are non-linear because what happens in the game depends on players’ route choices. Space syntax methods are applied to show how the ‘mapping’ of literary time-space has less to do with establishing degrees of real-world correspondence so much as with recognizing the architectural topographic form of the chronotope as expressing the integrity of the fictional world’s own system of reality. Firetop Mountain is then examined using ‘toponemic analysis’ to identify how the characteristic figures of actual narrative events are contingently generated through gameplay, rather than pre-determined by the global properties of its chronotopical form. Yet such contingency is not complete randomness. If it were the gaming world would be unplayable