Amalgamating sustainable design strategies into architectural curricula

In the era of climate change, rising sea levels, the hole in the ozone layer and current food crisis, sustainability is no longer a matter of choice; it is a must. While the term sustainability manages to embed itself in all aspects of contemporary life, sustainability in the built environment requires special attention. Designs created by architects and planners play a fundamental part in shaping the way we live, behave and interact with our surroundings. Smith (2001) argued that instilling sustainable design in curricula at schools of architecture is a significant method of encouraging sustainable architectural design in practice. This is particularly important in non-sustainable societies such as those of the Middle East. For these reasons, this study aims at exploring ‘sustainability strategies,’ as they may be described, adopted in different schools of architecture. The research surveys architectural curricula at different Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) exempted schools of Architecture, at part 1 and 2 levels. Meanwhile, it also observes the contradiction and difficulties of teaching sustainable architectural design in Egyptian and Middle Eastern societies, whose cultural fabric does not encourage environmental awareness. Finally, the study attempts to investigate, in an increased level of detail, how sustainable design education fits into the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula of the Architectural Engineering and Environmental Design Department (AEED) at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT) in Alexandria, Egypt. The paper concludes that the proper application of sustainable design strategies at early stages of architecture education has developed architects with sturdy understanding of their environment, climate and local identity, which can never happen if this is addressed in postgraduate studies or at later stages of the Architecture career

Planning and Design Strategies for Sustainable Urban Development

In order to create high impact low-carbon architecture it is necessary to address issues at the urban scale. This paper reviews methods adopted in the UK, Hong Kong and America and develops a series of themes that should be incorporated in modern city development strategies to produce green and sustainable outcomes. These are concerned with: planning policies and building regulations; neighborhood and site planning; and building design. Underlying themes which must be incorporated are connected to: building façade, systems design and operation; energy demand and supply; transportation systems; water supply and use; and wastes/pollution issues. To achieve success a number of support mechanisms are needed including strategic and infrastructure development, implementation of assessment frameworks, and the distribution of information and knowledge to stakeholders. The themes are compared to recent developments in the city of Kunming and proposals for future applications are explored

Design strategies for the creation of aperiodic nonchaotic attractors

Parametric modulation in nonlinear dynamical systems can give rise to attractors on which the dynamics is aperiodic and nonchaotic, namely with largest Lyapunov exponent being nonpositive. We describe a procedure for creating such attractors by using random modulation or pseudo-random binary sequences with arbitrarily long recurrence times. As a consequence the attractors are geometrically fractal and the motion is aperiodic on experimentally accessible timescales. A practical realization of such attractors is demonstrated in an experiment using electronic circuits.Comment: 9 pages. CHAOS, In Press, (2009

Supply chain implications of sustainable design strategies for electronics products

Increasing legislative and consumer pressures on manufacturers to improve sustainability necessitates that manufacturers consider the overall life cycle and not be scope restricted in creating products. Product strategies to improve sustainability have design implications as many of the decisions made during the design stage will then determine the environmental performance of the final product. Coordination across the supply chain is potentially beneficial as products with improved energy efficiency can be better realised. This paper examines traditional product provision and proposes a sustainable product design process using life cycle assessment (LCA) at key points, as these decision points can provide opportunities for environmental improvements of products. Case studies of consumer and industry products in the electronics sector are examined in terms of improving sustainability by reviewing product architecture and technology solutions. This paper proposes methods and analytical models to better understand sustainable design strategies for manufacturing firms and thus aid manufacturers during the earliest stages of product planning to consider alternative product development approaches which are more sustainable

Intranet Design Strategies

The intranets have been deployed extensively in large and small-scale organizations. It has grown rapidly by offering features like collaborative communication channels, easing the business processes etc. Typically organizations faced difficulties but they are prevalent while implementation. But the organizations lack clear strategies in designing intranet. It leads to loss on investment, time and productivity, a complete intranet failure. Previous studies mainly focused on management, security and usage etc. This paper presents 9 design strategies for intranet addressing system oriented plan that can be applied in real-time to achieve improvement in organizational performance

Design strategies in facades for the reduction of housing energy consumption

This article analyzes the energy-saving potential of various facade design strategies from a life cycle perspective, including the energy needed in the use stage and the embodied energy of materials. The results provide reference data on the behaviour of these systems in Spain and make it possible to identify the best strategies for reducing energy consumption in a wide variety of potential situations that may arise in both new construction and in the rehabilitation of existing facades. The impact categories studied are fossil fuel depletion and climate change, and design strategies are linked to climate data, orientation, air change rate, facade materials and wall composition. Exchanges between the interior and exterior environments take place through the building envelope, some of whose key design parameters include lighting, ventilation and heat flux. Improving this envelope can greatly reduce environmental impact, ensuring indoor environmental quality. This analysis confirms the need to consider the interactions among the parameters studied, as it shows that there are several design solutions with similar impacts, which can be adapted to project requirements. In both new construction and rehabilitation, some of these parameters may be determined by other design decisions not necessarily aimed at reducing environmental impact, so it can be very useful to be aware of a variety of design alternatives that can be implemented in specific projects

Computational effectiveness of LMI design strategies for vibration control of large structures

Distributed control systems for vibration control of large structures involve a large number of actuation devices and sensors that work coordinately to produce the desired control actions. Design strategies based on linear matrix inequality (LMI) formulations allow obtaining controllers for these complex control problems, which are characterized by large dimensionality, high computational cost and severe information constraints. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study of the computational effectiveness of three different LMI-based controller design strategies: H-infinity, energy-to-peak and energy-to-componentwise-peak. The H-infinity approach is a well-known design methodology and has been widely used in the literature. The energy-to-peak approach is a particular case of generalized H2 design that is gaining a growing relevance in structural vibration control. Finally, the energy-to-componentwise-peak approach is a less common case of generalized H2 design that produces promising results among the three considered approaches. These controller design strategies are applied to synthesize active state-feedback controllers for the seismic protection of a five-story building and a twenty-story building both equipped with complete systems of interstory actuation devices. To evaluate the computational effectiveness of the proposed LMI design methodologies, the corresponding computation times are compared and a suitable set of numerical simulations is carried out to assess the performance of the obtained controllers. As positive results, two main facts can be highlighted: the computational effectiveness of the energy-to-peak control design strategy and the particularly well-balanced behavior exhibited by the energy-to-componentwise-peak controllers. On the negative side, it has to be mentioned the computational inefficiency of the considered LMI design methodologies to properly deal with very-large-scale control problems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version