7,621 research outputs found

    Beyond tools: building learning organisations to adapt to a changing climate

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    Executive summary: The focus of this VCCCAR Visiting Fellowship was participation in the project ‘Implementing tools to increase adaptive capacity in the community and natural resources management sectors’. This project aimed to improve understanding of the adaptation capabilities and needs of three types of government service providers and funded agencies (catchment management authorities, community sector organisations and primary care partnerships). The intention was to draw on my experience of working at the UK Climate Impacts Program (UKCIP) and with projects in Europe to inform the development of this project and the way it might support adaptation efforts in Victoria.UKCIP was a small organisation, varying in size over its life from 2 to a maximum of about 25 people. Given such limited capacity there was a tension between trying to address the need for tailored adaptation support and the capacity to deliver it. One response was to provide widespread support through downloadable tools and other web resources. However, it was quickly discovered that downloading a tool only gets you so far. Similarly, having access to accurate climate data and information about future climate projections was also seen as the obvious place to start in responding to a changing climate. However, it soon became clear that even with access to accurate, reliable, salient information there could still be no assumption that decision makers would take action to adapt and there was frequently a gap between the quite high general awareness of climate change within an organisation (and an understanding of how it could affect their core business) and the implementation of actions to respond to it. This raises key questions about availability of usable information and extent of agreement on potential responses to climate risks.To be usable, information should relate to existing decision making processes and the key priorities of the organisation. It should also be locally relevant. In discussions with Victorian organisations, people wanted to know how to translate more general information about climate change into useful messages for everyday practice and service delivery. It is clearly important to start with current concerns and overlay on these the likely impacts of changing climate. Most future climate impacts are often not yet seen as urgent or important and there is a need for better coordination of users, demonstration projects, activities that bridge the gap between providers and users, and demonstration of how climate information can improve decision making.&nbsp

    Perspectives Note: The Enabling Environment for Capacity Development

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    The context matters for capacity development (CD). It sets the stage on which actors pursue their interests and agendas -- both of which are affected by change processes. And CD is change, in most cases producing winners and losers and reconfiguring the balance of influence and power in and between individuals, organizations and groups of organizations.This perspective paper -- one of five in a series prepared by the OECD/DAC as an input to preparation of the High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan in 2011 -- collects evidence about how the environment can be more or less enabling for CD, how actors can adapt to or influence the context they operate in, and what the implications are when country and development partners promote CD

    Interrogating the technical, economic and cultural challenges of delivering the PassivHaus standard in the UK.

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    A peer-reviewed eBook, which is based on a collaborative research project coordinated by Dr. Henrik Schoenefeldt at the Centre for Architecture and Sustainable Environment at the University of Kent between May 2013 and June 2014. This project investigated how architectural practice and the building industry are adapting in order to successfully deliver Passivhaus standard buildings in the UK. Through detailed case studies the project explored the learning process underlying the delivery of fourteen buildings, certified between 2009 and 2013. Largely founded on the study of the original project correspondence and semi-structured interviews with clients, architects, town planners, contractors and manufacturers, these case studies have illuminated the more immediate technical as well as the broader cultural challenges. The peer-reviewers of this book stressed that the findings included in the book are valuable to students, practitioners and academic researchers in the field of low-energy design. It was launched during the PassivHaus Project Conference, held at the Bulb Innovation Centre on the 27th June 2014

    Symposium on Disaster Resilience and Built Environment Education: Celebrating Project Successes: Book of Abstracts

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    Among many communities in the EU and beyond, disasters pose significant concerns and challenges. With growing population and infrastructures, the world’s exposure to disaster related hazards is increasing. In addition to loss of life, disasters greatly hamper the social-economic capacity of the member countries and also of the union as a whole. Swiss Re’s latest sigma report (2014) highlights the 308 disaster events in 2013, of which 150 were natural catastrophes and 158 man-made. Almost 26,000 people lost their lives or went missing in the disasters. Europe suffered the two most expensive natural disasters in insurance terms. The first was the massive flooding in Central and Eastern Europe in May and June, after four days of heavy rain that caused large-scale damage across Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. It led to 4.1billioninpaidclaimson4.1 billion in paid claims on 16.5 billion in economic losses. The second was the hailstorm that hit Germany and France in late July, causing 3.8billionininsurancepaymentson3.8 billion in insurance payments on 4.8 billion in economic losses. Most of those claims came from heavily populated areas of Germany. Altogether, Europe had economic losses worth 33billionfor33 billion for 15 billion in insurance payouts. For the first time in history the world has experienced three consecutive years where annual economic losses have exceeded $100 billio

    Proposition d'un modĂšle de processus pour les affichages publics adaptatifs supportant la participation citoyenne

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    National audienceIn recent years, public displays have been studied as a way to foster citizen participation. However, their surroundings and users are prone to high variability, which makes it tedious to accommodate different contexts with an optimal participation experience. In this paper, we propose adaptive public displays as a lead for solution in tackling this issue. From a review of the motivators and barriers affecting citizen's interaction with public displays we defined a process model destined to serve as a guide for designers of such systems.Au cours des derniÚres années, les affichages publics ont été étudiés comme moyen d'encourager la participation citoyenne. Cependant, leur environnement et leurs utilisateurs sont sujets à une grande variabilité, ce qui rend fastidieuse l'adaptation à différents contextes en conservant une expérience de participation optimale. Dans cet article, nous proposons les affichages publics adaptatifs comme piste de solution à ce problÚme. A partir d'une revue des motivations et des barriÚres qui affectent l'interaction des citoyens avec les affichages publics, nous avons défini un modÚle de processus destiné à servir de guide aux concepteurs de tels systÚmes

    Climate-responsive design:

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    In climate-responsive design the building becomes an intermediary in its own energy housekeeping, forming a link between the harvest of climate resources and low energy provision of comfort. Essential here is the employment of climate-responsive building elements, defined as structural and architectural elements in which the energy infrastructure is far-reaching integrated. This thesis presents the results of research conducted on what knowledge is needed in the early stages of the design process and how to transfer and transform that knowledge to the field of the architect in order for them to successfully implement the principles of climate-responsive design. The derived content, form and functional requirements provide the framework for a design decision support tool. These requirements were incorporated into a concept tool that has been presented to architects in the field, in order to gain their feedback. Climate-responsive design makes the complex task of designing even more complex. Architects are helped when sufficient information on the basics of climate-responsive design and its implications are provided as informative support during decision making in the early design stages of analysis and energy concept development. This informative support on climate-responsive design should address to different design styles in order to be useful to any type of architects. What is defined as comfortable has far-reaching implications for the way buildings are designed and how they operate. This in turn gives an indication of the energy used for maintaining a comfortable indoor environment. Comfort is not a strict situation, but subjective. Diversity is appreciated and comfort is improved when users have the ability to exert influence on their environment. Historically, the provision of comfort has led to the adoption of mechanical climate control systems that operate in many cases indifferent from the building space and mass and its environment. Climate-responsive design restores the context of local climate and environment as a design parameter. Many spatial, functional and comfort-related boundary conditions that have an effect on the energy design concept have been distinguished. There are many low-graded energy sources that can be put to use in the built environment, with local climate as the primary component. When exploring the potential of local climate, urban context needs to be taken into account since it heavily affects the actual potential. Since buildings are typically build to last for decades, consideration of changing climate and its expected effect on the energy potential is an important factor in the strategy to follow. The study of the energy potential of local climate resulted in a set of climate-related and context-related boundary conditions. The principles of climate-responsive design - the conceptual relations between energy source, energy treatment and comfort demand - can be translated into various design solutions, the contextual, architectural and technical implementation of these principles into an actual design. The design solutions can be divided into six categories- site planning, building form and layout, skin, structure, finish and (integrated)building service - that cover various dimensions in planning and construction. In this thesis a non-exhaustive list of design principles and solutions is presented using different matrices. In order to design using climate-responsive design principles the architect should be given an overview of the comfort contribution and energy performance of design solutions. Furthermore, the identification of collaborations and conflicts when using multiple design principles together is essential. The generation of a satisfying design is more than just stacking solutions upon each other. It should also be made clear what a possible energy function of a building element is besides its primary function. This is where comfort and energy related design objectives of climate-responsive design meet other objectives (i.e. spatial, functional and structural). Finally, the impact of climatere sponsive building elements on the appearance of design is relevant to concept orientated architects. Together this can be considered as the content requirements of the design-decision support tool. In the early stages of the design process climate-responsive design is about the generation of energy concepts. In this phase accessible guidelines and the option to compare alternatives is more important than to assess absolute performance. The conceptual design phase is dynamic and has many iterations. Informative, context specific knowledge reduces the number of iterations before the architect has generated a satisfying number of design options from which it can continue to the next design phase of assessment. Functional requirements for the framework of the design decision support tool are the inclusion of a knowledge base with expert knowledge and best practice examples, the provision of informative, context-specific knowledge, the provision of accessible guidelines, the provision of an option to compare alternatives, the inclusion of the ability to inform during and assist in decision-making (i.e. intelligence) and the limitation of complexity and the generation of easy to interpret output. The tool is primarily developed for the architect so it needs to blend in the architect’s workflow enabling the architect’s creativity and guiding his intuition. Other form requirements of the design-decision support tool are the presence of customisation options and custom navigation patterns, all presented in a visual style. A concept of the web-based tool has been developed in order to illustrate what a climate-responsive design-decision support tool could look like. The heart of the tool is formed by the knowledge base, constructed from items grouped into one of four categories: principles, solutions, projects and guidelines. Relationships between items are incorporated within the knowledge base as hyperlinks, which makes it easy to navigate from one item to another. The stored information is presented in numerous ways. Info sheets provide the most detailed presentation style containing all available information for an item, while catalogues, matrices and a gallery provide quick overviews and reveal direct relationships with other items. In order to become a true design-decision support tool, the presented tool needs to be further developed. This includes the use of a more context-specific presentation style and the inclusion of more context-specific knowledge, the addition of layers in which the knowledge is presented varying from more general to practical, the development and implementation of performance indicators and a more direct and visual approach to pinpoint synergetic and conflicting effects. By using the tool, architects can access relevant knowledge in different ways that suit their method of working. It enables the presentation of complex relationships in a clear way and by doing so unlocking a much broader part of the content to them. That will help speeding up the process of design iteration before the energy concept can be assessed in the successive phase of the design process

    Innovative Tools and Methods Using BIM for an Efficient Renovation in Buildings

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    This open access book describes a BIM-based toolkit that has been developed according to the latest research activities on building information modelling and semantic interoperability to optimize the building process. It highlights the impacts of using such new tools to fast renovation activities starting from the decision-making and design stages to the construction site management with the possibility to monitor occupants' and owners’ feedback during the realization process. In this process, a framework has been developed and implemented to allow stakeholders involved in a renovation project to efficiently compile, maintain, and add data about (i) building elements, (ii) building services systems, (iii) tenants, operators, and owners of the building, and (iv) current and predicted performance of the building from the various data sources available. The framework applies and specializes the existing practices in the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and ontology domain to the management of renovation projects. It has been designed to be open so that any system which implements the required functions and uses the specified conventions will be able to achieve semantic interoperability with other framework-compliant systems in the renovation domain. Finally, this book represents the validation process of the toolkit that has been held in three demo sites: a social housing building in Italy and two private residential buildings in Poland and Finland. The outcome shows that the toolkit facilitates the renovation process with relevant reductions of time, costs, and energy consumption and that the inhabitants can take advantage of the increase in building performances, quality, and comfort

    Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

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    The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers
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