An agglomeration payment for cost-effective biodiversity conservation in spatially structured landscapes

Compensation schemes in which land owners receive payments for voluntarily managing their land in a biodiversity-enhancing manner have become one of the most important instruments for biodiversity conservation worldwide. One key challenge when designing such schemes is to account for the spatial arrangement of habitats bearing in mind that for given total habitat area connected habitats are ecologically more valuable than isolated habitats. To integrate the spatial dimension in compensation schemes and based on the idea of an agglomeration bonus we consider a scheme in which land-owners only receive payments if managed patches are arranged in a specific spatial configuration. We compare the cost-effectiveness of agglomeration payments with spatially homogeneous payments on a conceptual level and for a real world case and find that efficiency gains of agglomeration payments are positive or zero but never negative. In the real world case, agglomeration payments lead to cost-savings of up to 70% compared to spatially homogeneous payments. --agglomeration bonus,biodiversity conservation,cost-effectiveness,ecologicaleconomic modelling,metapopulation,spatial heterogeneity

Investigating our future: how designers can get us all thinking

This paper, and the presentation it represents, discusses the importance of bringing users into the design process and some of the techniques that can be employed to achieve that. Designing for older people is particularly challenging because most designers do not have direct experience of the ways that people’s lives and expectations change as they become older so it is even more important than usual to give the user a direct voice in the designing. However this is not straightforward. Most people find it difficult to visualise products and environments that do not exist at the moment so we need to help them imagine possibilities and express their needs and desires. Sheffield Hallam University has pioneered methods for using the designer’s creative talents to create situations that allow people to act out new situations and engage with the creative opportunities that they present. These methods are particularly important in the contemporary world where products are connected by complex information systems so we must attend to how people engage with both the physical aspects of a product or environment and the systems that underlie the

The three dimensions of Inclusive Design: Part three

This is the third part of a three part blog that describes a guiding framework for inclusive design in a digitally transformed and increasingly connected world. Part One can be found here. Part Two can be found here. The three dimensions of the framework are: 1. Recognize, respect, and design for human uniqueness and variability. 2. Use inclusive, open & transparent processes, and co-design with people who have a diversity of perspectives, including people that can’t use or have difficulty using the current designs. 3. Realize that you are designing in a complex adaptive system

Designing for the Ubiquitous Computing era: towards the reinvention of everyday objects and the creation of new user experiences

Researchers of the Ubiquitous Computing community (Ubicomp) have been pursuing the vision of a world where technologies and services permeates every object of our lives for years. With components getting smaller, cheaper and more powerful, it has become possible to manufacture connected objects capable of interacting with resources of the World Wide Web. This opens up the possibility for researchers and practitioners to consider information as a design material and objects as platforms for services. By allowing users to personalize, complement or repurpose the functions of their objects, such services have a great impact on the way artifacts are designed. Designing for the Ubiquitous Era requires modifying our practice and reinforcing collaboration between disciplines at every steps of the creation process. In this article, we discuss the need to reinvent objects and to investigate the tools supporting the creation of rich services’ experiences