Comparative studies of offices pre and post — how changing spatial configurations affect organisational behaviours

Understanding the way in which design interventions in an office affect everyday users, and thus shape organisational behaviour, should be high on the agenda for architects, designers and consultants alike. Surprisingly, this seems rarely to be the case. Here we aim to help close this gap by studying a variety of organisations in depth both before and after an office move from the point of view of design practice. This paper thus aims at understanding how a newly designed office is seen, used and filled with life by staff, so that planners can continuously and systematically reflect on and learn from experience, and create effective and well-used workplaces for the future. The research and reflective practice presented in this paper resulted from a collaboration on 'Effective Workplaces' between The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies at University College London and Spacelab architects. Insights from in-depth case studies conducted over the last four years on various corporate clients in the media sector in the UK will be drawn upon. The studies each compared an organisation before and after it moved into a Spacelab-designed office. Two different lines of argument will be presented: firstly, results of the pre-post comparison of organisations before and after moving into a newly designed space suggest that physical space influences the way in which organisations communicate, interact, and perform in many ways. Secondly, the practical side of evidence-based design will be discussed. It can be seen that designers would do things differently if they had had the specific evidence prior to the design process. At the same time, difficulties arise in conducting 'evidence-based' practice, for example the problem of time in a business environment where designers are often asked to deliver solutions within days or weeks, whereas gaining a good understanding of a complex organisation may take months. These issues will be reflected on. General conclusions on the use and usefulness of Space Syntax in an architectural practice will be drawn

The city mouse and the country mouse: the geography of creativity and cultural production in Italy

Through census employment data we analyze the evolving structure of the Italian cultural economy and highlights diverging spatial and organizational patterns of cultural production systems in urban and regional areas. Whilst large metropolitan areas remain the more important loci of cultural content production and consumption, craft-based sectors and creative systems of design have a tendency to locate in non-metropolitan centers. Based on the historical formation of manufacturing districts and on the emergence of Rome and Milan as “world cities”, the Italian cultural economy provides an interesting case study to analyze the geographical patterns of different cultural product industries. We extend previous literature on the geography of the cultural economy by offering new insights as to conditions in which metropolitan and rural areas emerge as leading centers of cultural production and creativity.

Addressing the Quality and Safety Gap Part III: The Impact of the Built Environment on Patient Outcomes and the Role of Nurses in Designing Health Care Facilities

Discusses the evidence-based design of facilities' physical elements to align architecture, information technology, clinical processes, and workplace culture as it relates to nursing practice, administration, and education. Includes case summaries

Will Building ‘Good Fences’ Really Make ‘Good Neighbors’ in Science?

Problematic issues are raised by the expressed intention of the European Commission to promote greater awareness on the part of scientists in the “European Research Area” about intellectual property rights and their uses in the context of “Internet intensive research collaborations.” Promoting greater awareness and encouraging more systematic usage of IRP protections are logically distinct, but as policies for implementation – especially within the EC’s Fifth Framework Programme – the former can too readily shade into the latter. Building “good fences” does not make for “good (more productive) neighbors” in science. Balance needs to be maintained between the “open science” mode of research, and private proprietary R&D, because at the macro-system level the functions that each is well-suited to serve are complementary. Recent policy initiatives, particularly by the EC in relation to the legal protection of property rights in database, pose a serious threat to the utility of collaboratively consttructed digital information infrastructures that provide “information spaces” for voyages of scientific discovery. The case for alternative policy approaches is argued in this paper, and several specific proposals are set out for further discussion.

Doing the Holy Things: Baptism and Vocation

(Excerpt) Thank you, David, and thank you all. I\u27m honored to come here once again. Honored really to stand with you and to thank you who in season and out of season have cared about setting out the holy things of God in the midst of the holy people so that the holy One might be encountered and known and proclaimed, and that is the task you have done, you at the heart of many others in the Lutheran churches of North America. You have done this, in season and out of season, and it\u27s a task for which I thank you

The Cost of Making Disciples

(Excerpt) Christians, wrote Tertullian in the second century, are made, not born. Fortunately, we have a description of how they were made from the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus.l Exposed to the gospel through lives of committed Christians, inquirers were questioned as to the seriousness of their intentions. Were they willing to change their lives and to renounce occupational patterns that were incompatible with the faith? Or, was the idolatry permeating their culture so pervasive that they were unable to hear the word ? If these candidates were capable of making lifestyle corrections, they entered the catechumenate. For as long as three years, these members in- process were led with care and deliberateness into Christian life. The setting for this faith apprenticeship was liturgical rather than academic, with regular patterns of prayer, exorcism, and the laying on of hands

Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time

Asian Varieties of Service Capitalism?

There is currently only limited empirical research and theoretical conceptualisation of the role of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in the economies of Asia within economic geography or elsewhere in the wider social scientific literature. This paper argues that existing theoretical understandings of KIBS are inadequate to conceptualise the nature of ongoing KIBS development in Asian economies – both emerging and mature – and seeks to address this absence by developing a theoretical framework that draws on a range of existing theoretical approaches within and beyond economic geography. To do this, it proposes the concept of ‘service capitalism’, developed from work concerned with varieties of capitalism (VoC), variegated capitalism and advanced service industries. The paper elaborates its theoretical argument by presenting research into two forms of Asian service capitalism through two case studies examining respectively the specific nature of Japanese KIBS and the development of KIBS in China. Using the case studies, it demonstrates how service industry development in both these Asian economies exhibits distinctive characteristics that are a consequence of both local institutional, corporate, and socio-cultural contexts but are also interconnected the wider global economy in complex ways. The paper thus presents a significant and disruptive challenge to existing theories of KIBS development as based on the western experience, and contemporary deployments of the varieties of capitalism and variegated capitalism approaches

11 x 11 Domineering is Solved: The first player wins

We have developed a program called MUDoS (Maastricht University Domineering Solver) that solves Domineering positions in a very efficient way. This enables the solution of known positions so far (up to the 10 x 10 board) much quicker (measured in number of investigated nodes). More importantly, it enables the solution of the 11 x 11 Domineering board, a board up till now far out of reach of previous Domineering solvers. The solution needed the investigation of 259,689,994,008 nodes, using almost half a year of computation time on a single simple desktop computer. The results show that under optimal play the first player wins the 11 x 11 Domineering game, irrespective if Vertical or Horizontal starts the game. In addition, several other boards hitherto unsolved were solved. Using the convention that Vertical starts, the 8 x 15, 11 x 9, 12 x 8, 12 x 15, 14 x 8, and 17 x 6 boards are all won by Vertical, whereas the 6 x 17, 8 x 12, 9 x 11, and 11 x 10 boards are all won by Horizontal

The spatial economy of North American trade fairs

The version of record [Bathelt, H., & Spigel, B. (2012). The spatial economy of North American trade fairs. The Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien, 56(1), 18-38.] is available online at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00396.x/fullThrough a study of trade fairs, this article illustrates that relational approaches to economic geography are not limited to the sphere of economic and social relationships. These relationships are influenced by and, in turn, shape material realities, such as specific infrastructure and the labour market, in a reflexive manner. Trade fairs are “relational events” that bring together regional, national, and often international producers, users, suppliers, and other agents of a value chain or technology field for the purpose of exchanging knowledge about technological and market developments, building partnerships, and maintaining existing networks through learning by interaction and observation. However, these events are also situated in space and time, grounded in the contexts of particular industries, trade patterns, public and private investments, as well as the economic geographies of places. Focusing on North America, this article presents and analyzes data on the economic geography of trade fairs and their regional economic impact (number of events, exhibitors, attendees, exhibition space). It explores regional trade fair patterns and dynamic changes in major trade fair cities by emphasizing the role of history and industry context