Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

The Impossibilities of the Circular Economy

The fifth Factor X publication from the Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA), The Impossibilities of the Circular Economy provides an overview of the limits to the circular economy, emphasising the relationship between integrated resource use and more systemic leadership-management approaches. On a European level, the book ties into the recent European Green Deal and aims to empower actors across sectors and EU member countries to transition from existing linear models of value capture and expression to more systemic-circular solutions of value capture and expression. The volume provides a hands-on contribution towards building the knowledge and skill sets of current and future decision-makers who face these complex-systemic crises in their day-to-day business. The book further provides access to best practices from cutting-edge research and development findings, which will empower decision-makers to develop a more sustainable and equitable economy. Providing solutions for a more sustainable economy, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of natural resource use, sustainable business, environmental economics and sustainable development, as well as decision-makers and experts from the fields of policy development, industry and civil society

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

The Impossibilities of the Circular Economy

The fifth Factor X publication from the Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA), The Impossibilities of the Circular Economy provides an overview of the limits to the circular economy, emphasising the relationship between integrated resource use and more systemic leadership-management approaches. On a European level, the book ties into the recent European Green Deal and aims to empower actors across sectors and EU member countries to transition from existing linear models of value capture and expression to more systemic-circular solutions of value capture and expression. The volume provides a hands-on contribution towards building the knowledge and skill sets of current and future decision-makers who face these complex-systemic crises in their day-to-day business. The book further provides access to best practices from cutting-edge research and development findings, which will empower decision-makers to develop a more sustainable and equitable economy. Providing solutions for a more sustainable economy, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of natural resource use, sustainable business, environmental economics and sustainable development, as well as decision-makers and experts from the fields of policy development, industry and civil society

Surfing the interzones: posthuman geographies in twentieth century literature and film

This dissertation presents an analysis of posthuman texts through a discussion of posthuman landscapes, bodies, and communities in literature and film. In the introduction, I explore and situate the relatively recent term posthuman in relation to definitions proposed by other theorists, including N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Hans Moravec, Max More, and Francis Fukuyama. I position the posthuman as being primarily celebratory about the collapse of restrictive human boundaries such as gender and race, yet also containing within it more disturbing elements of the uncanny and apocalyptic. My project deals primarily with hybrid texts, in which the posthuman intersects and overlaps with other posts, including postmodernism and postcolonialism. In the first chapter, I examine the novels comprising J.G. Ballard's disaster series, and apply Bakhtin's theories of hybridization, and Deleuze and Guattari's notions of voyagings, becomings, and bodies without organs to delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman landscape. In the second chapter, I address Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas, and Werner Herzog in terms of issues of identity, mechanization, and replication with regards to the posthuman. In chapter three, I turn to posthuman cinema, and apply the notion of the cyborg to the work of David Lynch, as well as delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman film through a discussion of the Danish Dogme 95 film movement. In chapter four, I extend my discussion of modified bodies to address texts by Iain Banks and Angela Carter in terms of gender disruptions and new myths for the posthuman age. The final chapter, Second Life vs. The Mole People, examines both the optimism that the posthuman provides and also th tangible, social cost of the posthuman, through a juxtaposition of the elite metaverse of Second Life with the homeless subway tunnel dwellers in New York City, termed the mole people