Narrative Imagination: a Design Imperative

Each generation entrusts the collective future to the next. Just like the oral traditions of our past continue to manifest in our consciousness, we need to tell stories today that will free the imagination. Designers in particular need to develop the ability to articulate the imagined possibilities that the narrative imagination can create. In order to appreciate the complexity of interactions that are occurring in a spatial or object orientated context we need to think about the imagination as a vehicle to discover and explore these new possibilities. To do this we need to enhance our capacity to access the imagination and use it as a constructive and formative tool for generating concepts. This paper sets out to consider storytelling in design education as a vehicle for imaginative exploration. The narrative is used as the vehicle to stimulate and manage this imagination. Reference is made to a design education intervention where the focus of activity is on developing a narrative approach within a three-dimensional design module. The process is described in this paper as well as student observations of the experience

The contested privileging of zero carbon: plausibility, persuasiveness and professionalism

The global policy challenge of responding to climate change comprises a ‘super-wicked’ problem which consistently defies solution. Despite the UK Government’s commitment to zero carbon by 2050 there is little clarity on how this ambitious target is going to be achieved. Even on the level of individual buildings there is a perennial risk of unintended consequences if top-down targets are pursued in isolation of other considerations. The quest for zero carbon is hence embedded within ongoing processes of narrative contestation, and inextricably intertwined with issues of professional identity. It is contended that design is an inherently social process which continues throughout a building’s life-cycle. It is within this context that designers seek to accommodate zero-carbon targets alongside a multiple of other priorities. Hence any radical shift in the nature of educational provision may well prove to be counter-productive. Yet much more could undoubtedly be done during education to incubate the quest for low carbon as an essential component of professional identity. There is a need for professionals continuously to hold others to account on the basis of the plausibility of their zero carbon narratives. Of equal importance is the need to ensure that built environment professionals continue to respond to the changing policy landscape

Security Policies That Make Sense for Complex Systems: Comprehensible Formalism for the System Consumer

Information Systems today rarely are contained within a single user workstation, server, or networked environment. Data can be transparently accessed from any location, and maintained across various network infrastructures. Cloud computing paradigms commoditize the hardware and software environments and allow an enterprise to lease computing resources by the hour, minute, or number of instances required to complete a processing task. An access control policy mediates access requests between authorized users of an information system and the system\u27s resources. Access control policies are defined at any given level of abstraction, such as the file, directory, system, or network, and can be instantiated in layers of increasing (or decreasing) abstraction. For the system end-user, the functional allocation of security policy to discrete system components, or subsystems, may be too complex for comprehension. In this dissertation, the concept of a metapolicy, or policy that governs execution of subordinate security policies, is introduced. From the user\u27s perspective, the metapolicy provides the rules for system governance that are functionally applied across the system\u27s components for policy enforcement. The metapolicy provides a method to communicate updated higher-level policy information to all components of a system; it minimizes the overhead associated with access control decisions by making access decisions at the highest level possible in the policy hierarchy. Formal definitions of policy often involve mathematical proof, formal logic, or set theoretic notation. Such policy definitions may be beyond the capability of a system user who simply wants to control information sharing. For thousands of years, mankind has used narrative and storytelling as a way to convey knowledge. This dissertation discusses how the concepts of storytelling can be embodied in computational narrative and used as a top-level requirements specification. The definition of metapolicy is further discussed, as is the relationship between the metapolicy and various access control mechanisms. The use of storytelling to derive the metapolicy and its applicability to formal requirements definition is discussed. The author\u27s hypothesis on the use of narrative to explain security policy to the system user is validated through the use of a series of survey instruments. The survey instrument applies either a traditional requirements specification language or a brief narrative to describe a security policy and asks the subject to interpret the statements. The results of this research are promising and reflect a synthesis of the disciplines of neuroscience, security, and formal methods to present a potentially more comprehensible knowledge representation of security policy