How Communities Can Better Support Parents: Findings from an Effective Parenting Expo

This article focuses on identifying how communities can better support parents, families and young people. Participants at an Effective Parenting Expo (n=57) were surveyed about the value of the event, the challenges facing them as parents, and the changes that would significantly improve life for their family. This paper focuses on responses to one open-ended question, "Thinking of your community, what ONE change could be made to significantly improve life for your family?" Responses were coded into three key categories: Improved Sense of Community, Increased Support for Families and Safer Communities. These responses clearly demonstrate the importance that parents place on having a safe, cohesive and friendly community in which to raise their children. Unfortunately, with social capital, community interactions and connectedness declining, the challenge is how to reverse this trend and foster a stronger sense of community. Participants identified several changes they believed would build better communities, believing that free community activities, meeting places and practical parenting courses would better connect them with families in their own community. This research highlights the importance of community for family well-being, with parents identifying changes they believe will significantly improve life in their community for their family

Hack the Experience: Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science

Hack The Experience will reframe your perspective on how your audience engages your work. This will happen as you learn how to control attention through spatial and time-based techniques that you can harness as you build immersive installations or as you think about how to best arrange your work in an exhibition. You’ll learn things about the senses and how they interface with attention so that you can build in visceral forms of interactivity, engage people’s empathetic responses, and frame their moods. This book is a dense bouillon-cube of techniques that you can adapt and apply to your personal practice, and it’s a book that will walk you step-by-step through skill sets from ethnography, cognitive science, and multi-modal metaphors. The core argument of this book is that art is a form of cognitive engineering and that the physical environment (or objects in the physical environment) can be shaped to maximize emotional and sensory experience. Many types of art will benefit from this handbook (because cognition is pervasive in our experience of art), but it is particularly relevant to immersive experiential works such as installations, participatory/interactive environments, performance art, curatorial practice, architecture and landscape architecture, complex durational works, and works requiring new models of documentation. These types of work benefit from the empirical findings of cognitive science because intentionally leveraging basic human cognition in artworks can give participants new ways of seeing the world that are cognitively relevant. This leveraging process provides a new layer in the construction of conceptually grounded works

Best Babies Zone Basics: A Step-by-Step Guide

BBZ Basics is a step-by-step guide to implementing the Best Babies Zone (BBZ) approach. It is intended for both public health and non-public health organizations looking to start or build upon a place-based, multi-sector, community-driven initiative to reduce racial inequities in infant mortality. The guide moves through the Six Foundational Phases of a BBZ, including how to select a Zone, how to collaborate with residents and build resident leadership, and how to plan for evaluation. The guide also includes a number of tools and resources to help you in the planning process. Use of this guide will enable you to adopt the BBZ approach and support your efforts in creating stronger, healthier neighborhoods where every baby has the best chance in life

Marketing competition on a new product introduction - a structural analysis using systems thinking

Launching a new product on the market is a strategic activity that needs specific investments and a specific organisation. There are multiple factors that determine the success of a new product on the market but their direct effects are not often very well observable (marketing for example). With this study, we analysed the systemic structure underlying the dynamics related to the introduction of a new product on the market. In particular, we built a qualitative model based on the systems thinking methodology of causal-loop diagrams (CLDs), starting from the main structure and assumptions of the well-known Bass model. The model provides a systemic perspective on the interdependencies among various aspects that interact in important organisational areas. The presented causal-loop diagram tries to describe the systems structure which is intrinsic to the introduction and diffusion of a new product on the market, and how ultimately the related dynamics could be manage

Steps for Success: Engaging a Consultant

Consultants support the effectiveness of nonprofit agencies and grantmakers in many ways. For example, you might turn to a consultant to bring expertise on a specialized topic, to help you understand and address a major challenge, or to facilitate alignment within a group. But no single consultant can do everything, client organizations often have a lot at stake when they engage an outside service provider, and the inherent power dynamic between consultant and client needs to be managed well to develop a productive partnership. How do you find and collaborate with a consultant effectively to reach your goals? This tool features nine steps that can help your organization build strong relationships with consultants, adding value through a sound investment of your time and money. It is accompanied by links to other resources that can inform your work with consultants

“Give Me Your Hand and I’ll Teach You How To Build”: Travelling Practices of Participation in Housing, from Albania to the UK

In this thesis two stories of participation in housing entwine across space and time. The first involves a migrant community living in an informal, self-constructed neighbourhood called Bathore on the outskirts of Tiranë, Albania, who benefitted from a participatory upgrading programme with a local planning NGO, from 1995-2005. The second involves a group of individuals in housing need who built a prototype house in collaboration with the researcher, entitled ‘Protohome’, which was temporarily sited and open to the public in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in 2016. The aim of this research is to locate and test alternative approaches to housing informed by, and embedded in, the conditions of the contemporary UK context: austerity, welfare cuts and caps, rising homelessness, housing precarity and the residualisation of social housing. The research is not simply a design exercise, but seeks approaches to housing which are collaborative, participatory and socially sustainable and which have learning and transformational potential for those in housing need at their centre. Consequently, the research translates learning from Bathore, where the practices and experiences of housing have been formed through conditions of protracted scarcity. Through a critical examination of the settling and house-building process, as well as the participatory strategies used in the upgrading programme, the objective of this research is to mobilise learning from Bathore for the Protohome project. In doing so, the research draws from post-colonial scholarship, and activates this through the philosophies and practices of Participatory Action Research. Within this translocal learning process, where knowledge is translated between seemingly different contexts, the research seeks to deconstruct preconceptions about who or where holds the ‘authentic’ knowledge with regards to urban development and housing processes. As a result, in the stories presented here, of designing, building and collaborating, knowledge is deeply embedded in place, people and histories, yet this knowledge can be remapped and used to inform an entirely new context. The research thus moves between the particularities of place and more general observations. It is simultaneously located and dislocated. The translocal lens employed thus goes beyond comparison, it actively tests approaches from one location to the other. Through this translocal learning process the research uncovers how participation in housing may operate as a tool for learning, capacity building and for the creation of new social networks. Yet this is not without the interplay of power. Furthermore this is set within an often obstructive institutional context and an increasingly punitive welfare state, which makes this story complicated and, at times, despondent. However, the research highlights that organised and politicised forms of participation in housing may open up routes for potentially marginalised people to ‘speak to’ and ‘with’ formal institutions of power. In the practical testing of housing approaches on a public-facing live build, the Protohome project not only grounds these conceptual ideas, but also offers an innovative approach to research methodology and dissemination through praxis, which has multi-scalar impacts. On the basis of findings, the thesis tentatively proposes an agenda for ‘participatory housing’, where housing is a route to learning as opposed to an economic product or mere bricks and mortar

Introduction to the computational structural mechanics testbed

The Computational Structural Mechanics (CSM) testbed software system based on the SPAR finite element code and the NICE system is described. This software is denoted NICE/SPAR. NICE was developed at Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory and contains data management utilities, a command language interpreter, and a command language definition for integrating engineering computational modules. SPAR is a system of programs used for finite element structural analysis developed for NASA by Lockheed and Engineering Information Systems, Inc. It includes many complementary structural analysis, thermal analysis, utility functions which communicate through a common database. The work on NICE/SPAR was motivated by requirements for a highly modular and flexible structural analysis system to use as a tool in carrying out research in computational methods and exploring computer hardware. Analysis examples are presented which demonstrate the benefits gained from a combination of the NICE command language with a SPAR computational modules

Economic and Business Responses to the Pressures of Commoditization

This paper examines the pressures of commoditization will continue to exert itself on companies and managers everywhere: the increasing impact of demographic change; the requirement to maintain a keen eye on costs in order to compete effectively within the global market; the continued advance of technology; the ability to standardize processes and eliminate major inefficiencies; the pressure to outsource and offshore business activities in order to exploit the cost advantages of cheaper labour and the opportunity for your competition to attack your markets and replicate your products and services more freely.Tackling commoditization in a fragmented or short-termist way will not allow you to understand its effects and nor will it provide the solid platform required to build an effective response. So when it comes to considering the potential impacts of commoditization you need to ask yourself the following two questions: 1. Can all or part of our business become commoditized? It is easy to believe that you are immune to the effects of commoditization and that you don’t need to respond to something that may not even be on your horizon. When responding to this question the best approach is to start from the position that everything you do is capable of becoming commoditized if not now, then certainly at some point in the future. Of course you may find that not everything can be commoditized, but it is far better to come to this conclusion after completing a thorough analysis of your business than making assumptions based upon a limited perspective or worse still, gut feel 2. How should we respond to the threat of commoditization? In particular should we embrace it or avoid it? This is a crucial question to answer once you have understood the threats and opportunities commoditization poses to the organization. As with any strategic decision it is likely to have significant operational implications. In some cases you may find that you have little alternative but to become more commoditized yourself, whilst in others you may be able to adopt a more flexible approach. When considering the response, you will need to think about such things as: • How can we insulate ourselves from the threat of commoditization? • Given the choice what parts of our business should we allow to become commoditized? • Where and in which markets should we innovate as a way of avoiding the commoditization trap? • Where should we target our investments – with our customers, on our back office processes, in research and development, on acquisitions or all of the above?Commoditization, Offshoring, Talent, Technology, Competition, Inequality