A3 thinking approach to support knowledge-driven design

Problem solving is a crucial skill in product development. Any lack of effective decision making at an early design stage will affect productivity and increase costs and the lead time for the other stages of the product development life cycle. This could be improved by the use of a simple and informative approach which allows the designers and engineers to make decisions in product design by providing useful knowledge. This paper presents a novel A3 thinking approach to problem solving in product design, and provides a new A3 template which is structured from a combination of customised elements (e.g. the 8 Disciplines approach) and reflection practice. This approach was validated using a case study in the Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) design issue for an automotive electrical sub-assembly product. The main advantage of the developed approach is to create and capture the useful knowledge in a simple manner. Moreover, the approach provides a reflection section allowing the designers to turn their experience of design problem solving into proper learning and to represent their understanding of the design solution. These will be systematically structured (e.g. as a design checklist) to be circulated and shared as a reference for future design projects. Thus, the recurrence of similar design problems will be prevented and will aid the designers in adopting the expected EMC test results

Citizen noise pollution monitoring

Trabajo presentado a la 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government, celebrada en Puebla (México) del 17 al 21 de mayo de 2009.In this paper we present a new approach to monitor noise pollution involving citizens and built upon the notions of participatory sensing and citizen science. We enable citizens to measure their personal exposure to noise in their everyday environment by using GPS-equipped mobile phones as noise sensors. The geo-localised measures and user-generated meta-data can be automatically sent and shared online with the public to contribute to the collective noise mapping of cities. Our prototype, called NoiseTube, can be found online.This work was partially supported by the EU under contract IST- 34721 (TAGora). The TAGora project is funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies program (IST-FET) of the European Commission. Matthias Stevens is a Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders (Aspirant van het Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen).Peer reviewe

Data for Social Good

This open access book provides practical guidance for non-profits and community sector organisations about how to get started with data analytics projects using their own organisations’ datasets and open public data. The book shares best practices on collaborative social data projects and methodology. For researchers, the work offers a playbook for partnering with community organisations in data projects for public good and gives worked examples of projects of various sizes and complexity

Developing spatial literacy through design of built environments: Art and crafts teachers’ strategies

Designing built environments demands the ability to make translations between your visions, visual representations of these, and the full-scale environment that is to be built. Pupils working on architectural tasks face these challenges of translation. How can the teacher come to their aid? Research on teaching strategies for the architectural studio has sought to articulate the entire design process, something that leads to overarching strategies but less hands-on, detailed descriptions. This article offers greater in-depth insight into the strategies teachers use to enhance pupils’ spatial literacy. In semi-structured interviews, six lower secondary school Art and crafts teachers described their teaching practice related to architectural tasks. From the teachers’ detailed moves, we have identified five teaching strategies and placed them in a visual model that demonstrates what role they may play in aiding pupils in the process of designing built environments. By articulating these strategies, we hope to contribute to the development of the vocabulary used in and about teaching design and architecture

The advantages of information management through building information modelling

As building information modelling (BIM) is positioned by governments and construction professionals as a solution to the problems in the construction industry, research is needed into the benefits BIM actually confers. The focus here is on the effectiveness of BIM as a medium for communicating information within a construction team. A case study of an offsite precast concrete fabrication facility was conducted. At the time of the study, the facility was supplying precast units for four public sector projects, and using four information management systems: e-mail, a construction project extranet tool, an Enterprise Resource Planning system and a new BIM-based system. The flow of information through the four media was measured and visualized as the projects progressed. This quantitative measurement of information flow was combined with qualitative data from interviews with facility staff. It was found that the introduction of the BIM-based system diverted information flow through the building model and away from the extranet system. The use of e-mail was largely unaffected. BIM allowed considerably more accurate, on-time and appropriate exchange of information. It is concluded it is possible to quantify some of the benefits of BIM to information management. This research paves the way for future research into the management of more construction project information linked more closely to building models

Animating the evolution of software

The use and development of open source software has increased significantly in the last decade. The high frequency of changes and releases across a distributed environment requires good project management tools in order to control the process adequately. However, even with these tools in place, the nature of the development and the fact that developers will often work on many other projects simultaneously, means that the developers are unlikely to have a clear picture of the current state of the project at any time. Furthermore, the poor documentation associated with many projects has a detrimental effect when encouraging new developers to contribute to the software. A typical version control repository contains a mine of information that is not always obvious and not easy to comprehend in its raw form. However, presenting this historical data in a suitable format by using software visualisation techniques allows the evolution of the software over a number of releases to be shown. This allows the changes that have been made to the software to be identified clearly, thus ensuring that the effect of those changes will also be emphasised. This then enables both managers and developers to gain a more detailed view of the current state of the project. The visualisation of evolving software introduces a number of new issues. This thesis investigates some of these issues in detail, and recommends a number of solutions in order to alleviate the problems that may otherwise arise. The solutions are then demonstrated in the definition of two new visualisations. These use historical data contained within version control repositories to show the evolution of the software at a number of levels of granularity. Additionally, animation is used as an integral part of both visualisations - not only to show the evolution by representing the progression of time, but also to highlight the changes that have occurred. Previously, the use of animation within software visualisation has been primarily restricted to small-scale, hand generated visualisations. However, this thesis shows the viability of using animation within software visualisation with automated visualisations on a large scale. In addition, evaluation of the visualisations has shown that they are suitable for showing the changes that have occurred in the software over a period of time, and subsequently how the software has evolved. These visualisations are therefore suitable for use by developers and managers involved with open source software. In addition, they also provide a basis for future research in evolutionary visualisations, software evolution and open source development

Poor Philanthropist II: New approaches to sustainable development

The second title in the Poor Philanthropist Series, this monograph represents the culmination of a six-year journey; a journey characterised in the first three years by in-depth qualitative research which resulted in an understanding of philanthropic traditions among people who are poor in southern Africa and gave rise to new and innovative concepts which formed the focus of the research monograph The Poor Philanthropist: How and Why the Poor Help Each Other, published by the Southern Africa-United States Centre for Leadership and Public Values in 2005

Designing as Construction of Representations: A Dynamic Viewpoint in Cognitive Design Research

This article presents a cognitively oriented viewpoint on design. It focuses on cognitive, dynamic aspects of real design, i.e., the actual cognitive activity implemented by designers during their work on professional design projects. Rather than conceiving de-signing as problem solving - Simon's symbolic information processing (SIP) approach - or as a reflective practice or some other form of situated activity - the situativity (SIT) approach - we consider that, from a cognitive viewpoint, designing is most appropriately characterised as a construction of representations. After a critical discussion of the SIP and SIT approaches to design, we present our view-point. This presentation concerns the evolving nature of representations regarding levels of abstraction and degrees of precision, the function of external representations, and specific qualities of representation in collective design. Designing is described at three levels: the organisation of the activity, its strategies, and its design-representation construction activities (different ways to generate, trans-form, and evaluate representations). Even if we adopt a "generic design" stance, we claim that design can take different forms depending on the nature of the artefact, and we propose some candidates for dimensions that allow a distinction to be made between these forms of design. We discuss the potential specificity of HCI design, and the lack of cognitive design research occupied with the quality of design. We close our discussion of representational structures and activities by an outline of some directions regarding their functional linkages