Designing a New Tactile Display Technology and its Disability Interactions

People with visual impairments have a strong desire for a refreshable tactile interface that can provide immediate access to full page of Braille and tactile graphics. Regrettably, existing devices come at a considerable expense and remain out of reach for many. The exorbitant costs associated with current tactile displays stem from their intricate design and the multitude of components needed for their construction. This underscores the pressing need for technological innovation that can enhance tactile displays, making them more accessible and available to individuals with visual impairments. This research thesis delves into the development of a novel tactile display technology known as Tacilia. This technology's necessity and prerequisites are informed by in-depth qualitative engagements with students who have visual impairments, alongside a systematic analysis of the prevailing architectures underpinning existing tactile display technologies. The evolution of Tacilia unfolds through iterative processes encompassing conceptualisation, prototyping, and evaluation. With Tacilia, three distinct products and interactive experiences are explored, empowering individuals to manually draw tactile graphics, generate digitally designed media through printing, and display these creations on a dynamic pin array display. This innovation underscores Tacilia's capability to streamline the creation of refreshable tactile displays, rendering them more fitting, usable, and economically viable for people with visual impairments

Facility Requirements for Teaching a Standards-Based High School Technology Education Curriculum

This research established the essential equipment, tools, hardware and software needed to teach a contemporary standards-based Technology Education program at the high school level with one teacher. A three round Delphi study established what a contemporary Technology Education lab should ideally include utilizing the expert opinion of teachers in the field, teacher educators and administrators with direct roles in program development. The research also suggests types of activities which could be utilized in such a facility. Equipping a facility with these essential items could assist teachers in preparing students to become technologically literate, by addressing all of the Standards for Technological Literacy to include engineering and design concepts. Most Americans believe all citizens should be technologically literate and should have adequate facilities to accomplish that goal (Rose, Gallup, Dugger and Starkweather, 2004). Shields and Harris (2007) indicated Technology Education facilities and components have been less defined over the past 26 years creating confusion when identifying Technology Education facilities and programs. The panel of experts chosen for this Delphi study established three categories: essential items, moderately important items and non-essential items. The panel identified equipment, tools, hardware and software needed to equip a contemporary Technology Education facility giving the teacher laboratory capabilities to teach a standards based curriculum. Such a facility might provide a setting in which high school students could graduate with a basic understanding of technology; how to assess, use and manage technology in a facility with similar tools, equipment, hardware, and software; or in other words, achieve technological literacy (ITEA, 2000). Such a list gives school administrators a tool to better understand facility needs, curricular areas, examples of activities, as well as the equipment, tools and materials necessary to implement a standards-based program within their respective districts

NASA SBIR abstracts of 1991 phase 1 projects

The objectives of 301 projects placed under contract by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are described. These projects were selected competitively from among proposals submitted to NASA in response to the 1991 SBIR Program Solicitation. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 301, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference of the 1991 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA Field Center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number are included

Material geographies of the maker movement : community workshops and the making of sustainability in Edinburgh, Scotland

Recent years have seen the emergence of a novel type of community space around the world, labelled variously as makerspaces, hackerspaces, hacklabs, Fab Labs, and repair cafés. These workshops, often known collectively as the ‘maker movement’, have inspired considerable speculation regarding their potential to prefigure a more sustainable economy, including a shift to localised and participatory forms of production and consumption (Smith and Light, 2017). Until recently, the social scientific work on such spaces has been sparse, especially in-depth ethnographic work, though scholars are increasingly turning their attention to them, particularly in the fields of design and science and technology studies. This thesis, a practice-led ‘enactive ethnography’ drawing from three case study workshops in Edinburgh, Scotland, explores the question of sustainable development and maker spaces along two main axes: firstly, the emergence of sustainable practice in such spaces, and secondly, the relevance of such spaces to the cultivation of human wellbeing. The thesis is the first examination of such spaces drawing from developments in social theory towards relational materialism, more-than-representational approaches, and a focus on social practice. It draws a number of conclusions. Firstly, that claims of an undifferentiated global ‘maker movement’ may be exaggerated: the grassroots participant-led creation of such spaces results in irreducible diversity and local differentiation. Secondly, while claims about the potential of such spaces for reconfiguring global production and consumption are overstated, when viewed from a practice-oriented perspective, the communities of practice populating such sites comprise potent and potentially-valuable crucibles of knowledge and materials. And thirdly, trying to move away from individualistic conceptions of wellbeing, the case studies provided evidence for the shared workshops playing a crucial role in the contingent emergence of participant wellbeing. These findings are further developed in tandem with a posthuman reading of maker practices, contributing to timely scholarly debates on ‘making’ and ‘craft’

Advancing the Frontier of Extended Producer Responsibility: The management of waste electrical and electronic equipment in non-OECD countries

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) has become a salient issue in non-OECD countries. With a growing awareness about serious damages to the environment and human health from a lack of safe treatment and recycling of WEEE, there has been a search for policy responses in several of these countries. This research finds that extended producer responsibility (EPR), a policy principle that underpins WEEE programmes in many OECD countries, can help solve the WEEE problem in non-OECD countries by putting the onus on the producers to ensure environmentally sound management of their end-of-life products and make improvements in their product systems, including change in product design. Although there are challenges to the implementation of EPR in emerging and developing economies, notably the problem of free riders and the competition for materials from the polluting recycling sector, they are manageable. In addition, opportunities exist that can facilitate the development of EPR-based solutions, such as the relatively small stock of historical WEEE and manufacturers that have the commitment and experiences with the principle. What is needed to realise this potential is for the policy-makers to create a policy framework that allows and encourages product and system innovations from the producers

Smart Technologies for Precision Assembly

This open access book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 5.5 International Precision Assembly Seminar, IPAS 2020, held virtually in December 2020. The 16 revised full papers and 10 revised short papers presented together with 1 keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address topics such as assembly design and planning; assembly operations; assembly cells and systems; human centred assembly; and assistance methods in assembly

Processpatching: defining new methods in aRt&D

In the context of a rapidly changing domain of contemporary electronic art practice- where the speed of technological innovation and the topicality of art 'process as research' methods are both under constant revision- the process of collaboration between art, computer science and engineering is an important addition to existing 'R&D'. Scholarly as well as practical exploration of artistic methods, viewed in relation to the field of new technology, can be seen to enable and foster innovation in both the conceptualisation and practice of the electronic arts. At the same time, citing new media art in the context of technological innovation brings a mix of scientific and engineering issues to the fore and thereby demands an extended functionality that may lead to R&D, as technology attempts to take account of aesthetic and social considerations in its re-development. This new field of new media or electronic art R&D is different from research and development aimed at practical applications of new technologies as we see them in everyday life. A next step for Research and Development in Art (aRt&D) is a formalisation of the associated work methods, as an essential ingredient for interdisciplinary collaboration. This study investigates how electronic art patches together processes and methods from the arts, engineering and computer science environments. It provides a framework describing the electronic art methods to improve collaboration by informing others about one's artistic research and development approach. This investigation is positioned in the electronic art laboratory where new alliances with other disciplines are established. It provides information about the practical and theoretical aspects of the research and development processes of artists. The investigation addresses fundamental questions about the 'research and development methods' (discussed and defined at length in these pages), of artists who are involved in interdisciplinary collaborations amongst and between the fields of Art, Computer Science, and Engineering. The breadth of the fields studied necessarily forced a tight focus on specific issues in the literature, addressed herein through a series of focused case studies which demonstrate the points of synergy and divergence between the fields of artistic research and development, in a wider art&D' context. The artistic methods proposed in this research include references from a broad set of fields (e. g. Technology, Media Arts, Theatre and Performance, Systems Theories, the Humanities, and Design Practice) relevant to and intrinsically intertwined with this project and its placement in an interdisciplinary knowledge domain. The aRt&D Matrix provides a complete overview of the observed research and development methods in electronic arts, including references to related disciplines and methods from other fields. The new Matrix developed and offered in this thesis also provides an instrument for analysing the interdisciplinary collaboration process that exclusively reflects the information we need for the overview of the team constellation. The tool is used to inform the collaborators about the backgrounds of the other participants and thus about the expected methods and approaches. It provides a map of the bodies of knowledge and expertise represented in any given cross-disciplinary team, and thus aims to lay the groundwork for a future aRt&D framework of use to future scholars and practitioners alike