Packaging curiosities : towards a grammar of three-dimensional space

Western museums are public institutions, open and accessible to all sectors of the population they serve. Increasingly, they are becoming more accountable to the governments that fund them, and criteria such as visitation figures are being used to assess their viability. In order to ensure their survival in the current climate of economic rationalism, museums need to maintain their audiences and attract an even broader demographic. To do this, they need to ensure that visitors feel comfortable, welcome and secure inside their spaces. They also need to give visitors clear entry points for engaging with and valuing the objects and knowledge on display in exhibitions. This thesis maps a grammar of three-dimensional space with a strong focus on the interpersonal metafunction. Building on the social semiotic tools developed by Halliday (1978, 1985a), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Martin (1992) and Matthiessen (1995), it identifies two interpersonal resources for organising space: Binding and Bonding. Binding is the main focus of the thesis. It theorises the way people's emotions can be affected by the organisation of three-dimensional space. Essentially, it explores the affectual disposition that exists between a person and the space that person occupies by focussing on how a space can be organised to make an occupant feel secure or insecure. Binding is complemented by Bonding. Bonding is concerned with the way the occupants of a space are positioned interpersonally to create solidarity. In cultural institutions like museums and galleries, Bonding is concerned with making visitors feel welcome and as though they belong, not just to the building and the physical environment, but to a community of like-minded people. Such feelings of belonging are also crucial to the long-term survival of the museum. Finally, in order to present a metafunctionally diversified grammar of space, the thesis moves beyond interpersonal meanings. It concludes by exploring the ways textual and ideational meanings can be organised in three-dimensional space

Packaging curiosities : towards a grammar of three-dimensional space

Western museums are public institutions, open and accessible to all sectors of the population they serve. Increasingly, they are becoming more accountable to the governments that fund them, and criteria such as visitation figures are being used to assess their viability. In order to ensure their survival in the current climate of economic rationalism, museums need to maintain their audiences and attract an even broader demographic. To do this, they need to ensure that visitors feel comfortable, welcome and secure inside their spaces. They also need to give visitors clear entry points for engaging with and valuing the objects and knowledge on display in exhibitions. This thesis maps a grammar of three-dimensional space with a strong focus on the interpersonal metafunction. Building on the social semiotic tools developed by Halliday (1978, 1985a), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Martin (1992) and Matthiessen (1995), it identifies two interpersonal resources for organising space: Binding and Bonding. Binding is the main focus of the thesis. It theorises the way people's emotions can be affected by the organisation of three-dimensional space. Essentially, it explores the affectual disposition that exists between a person and the space that person occupies by focussing on how a space can be organised to make an occupant feel secure or insecure. Binding is complemented by Bonding. Bonding is concerned with the way the occupants of a space are positioned interpersonally to create solidarity. In cultural institutions like museums and galleries, Bonding is concerned with making visitors feel welcome and as though they belong, not just to the building and the physical environment, but to a community of like-minded people. Such feelings of belonging are also crucial to the long-term survival of the museum. Finally, in order to present a metafunctionally diversified grammar of space, the thesis moves beyond interpersonal meanings. It concludes by exploring the ways textual and ideational meanings can be organised in three-dimensional space

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

Designing together apart : computer supported collaborative design in architecture

The design of computer tools to assist in work has often attempted to replicate manual methods. This replication has been proven to fail in a diversity of fields such as business management, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer- Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). To avoid such a failure being repeated in the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Design (CSCD), this thesis explores the postulation that CSCD does not have to be supported by tools which replicate the face-to-face design context to support distal architectural design. The thesis closely examines the prevailing position that collaborative design is a social and situated act which must therefore be supported by high bandwidth tools. This formulation of architectural collaboration is rejected in favour of the formulation of a collaborative expert act. This proposal is tested experimentally, the results of which are presented. Supporting expert behaviour requires different tools than the support of situated acts. Surveying research in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), the thesis identifies tools that support expert work. The results of the research is transferred to two contexts: teaching and practice. The applications in these two contexts illustrate how CSCD can be applied in a variety of bandwidth and technological conditions. The conclusion is that supporting collaborative design as an expert and knowledge-based act can be beneficially implemented in the teaching and practice of architecture

Rethinking English for academic purposes : towards a performance-centred pedagogy

Contains fulltext : mmubn000001_027906248.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Promotor : H. Bloemendal125 p

Distributed cognition and computer supported collaborative design: The organisation of work in construction engineering

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The intellectual contribution of this thesis lies within the area of computer supported co-operative work (CSCW), and more specifically, computer supported co-operative design (CSCD). CSCW is concerned with the development of information systems and technological support for multi-participant work activities. Research into CSCW seeks to understand how people and organisations interact with one another, and to integrate this understanding with the development of computer based tools to support real world settings. Much of the technology developed to support the work of designers has been developed to aid individuals working alone, with tools like computer aided drafting (CAD), scheduling, and database software. The growth of interest in ‘groupware’ has led many technology developers to adapt these design tools for use in group situations. However, joint activities are different from those performed alone, and organisational structures can both interfere with, and supplement co-operative work practices in a way that the current technologies cannot provide support for. To develop effective group design tools, we need to understand more about collaborative processes in design. This thesis draws from the theoretical underpinning of cognitive science and the methods of anthropology and sociology, in an interdisciplinary study of design performance in the construction industry. Fieldwork is used as a method of qualitative data collection and this is examined within the analytic framework of distributed cognition. The results of this analysis provide a useful and usable description of the work of design that technology developers can use to support collaborative design work. In line with the methods of distributed cognition, the activities observed in the workplace studies are examined in terms of their processes and representations. The resources that were available to the design participants are made explicit, as are their situation-specific work patterns. Two case studies of design are examined. The first of these describes design work in a civil engineering project, which involves a number of different design activities. The second describes the work of consulting engineers in building design, focusing on a more limited design role, which is used to back up and supplement areas of the first study that were understood to be particularly relevant. The findings of the study demonstrate how design processes operate simultaneously at personal, organisational and inter-organisational levels. The distinction between the formal, organisational procedures, and the informal, social processes that compliment them is examined to show how these are interrelated in the performance of the design task and their importance to the mechanisms used to co-ordinate actions. The findings of the study have implications for the development of novel technologies to augment the engineering design process, and have already been used in the development of assistive design technologies. The thesis demonstrates that the framework of distributed cognition can be used in the analysis of cognition within a setting, involving multiple individuals, in concert with 'natural' and 'artificial' artefacts. The thesis makes clear a number of processes in design that can only be examined from a perspective which includes the social dimensions of work. The methods of study focus on the resources in collaborative activities, whilst the analysis, structured in terms of the representations and processes of collaborative activity, shows that the method can be used effectively in the development of CSCW and CSCD technologies