81 research outputs found
GRASP News Volume 9, Number 1
A report of the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory
\u3cem\u3eGRASP News\u3c/em\u3e: Volume 9, Number 1
The past year at the GRASP Lab has been an exciting and productive period. As always, innovation and technical advancement arising from past research has lead to unexpected questions and fertile areas for new research. New robots, new mobile platforms, new sensors and cameras, and new personnel have all contributed to the breathtaking pace of the change. Perhaps the most significant change is the trend towards multi-disciplinary projects, most notable the multi-agent project (see inside for details on this, and all the other new and on-going projects). This issue of GRASP News covers the developments for the year 1992 and the first quarter of 1993
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“Focus on the Users”: Empathy, Anticipation, and Perspective-taking in Healthcare Architecture
This dissertation is a phenomenological anthropology of intersubjectivity in the design of healthcare architecture. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with architectural designers in the San Francisco Bay Area, this dissertation details how architectural designers derive and enact their understandings of the healthcare professionals and patients for whom they design. Since the 1960s, many architects have taken up an orientation toward design that I herein refer to as “Methodological User-Centricity” (MUC). The premise is simple: better design hinges on better empirical knowledge of the people being designed for, and that knowledge is best acquired by what are often social-science-inspired methods. One of the most influential encapsulations of this orientation in design today (in architecture and beyond) is “empathy”. The healthcare architects in this ethnographic study believed “empathic” knowledge of “users”—including patients, doctors, nurses—was essential to improving healthcare, and sought to develop this understanding of occupants through games, interviews, and other methods for learning about users’ needs, values, and experiences. Situated in this context, this dissertation examines the background premises and methods through which these architectural designers enact their specific forms of constituting others and intervening in the built environment on their behalf. Working from data running the gamut of architectural activities from initial stages of user research and conceptualization, to completion and retrospective evaluation by both designers and end-users, the dissertation analyzes the diverse modalities of experience by which members of architectural project teams orient themselves to users’ needs and possibilities. In doing so, the dissertation approaches architecture as a polymorphous response to others, one ultimately rooted in manifold forms intersubjectivity and degrees of social understanding. Nevertheless, this dissertation also presents a critical analysis of unintentional shortcomings arising through unequal user representation in architectural designers’ research with healthcare institutions
History, Space and Place
Spaces, too, have a history. And history always takes place in spaces. But what do historians mean when they use the word ""spaces""? And how can spaces be historically investigated?
Susanne Rau provides a survey of the history of Western concepts of space, opens up interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of space in fields ranging from physics and geography to philosophy and sociology, and explains how historical spatial analysis can be methodologically and conceptually conceived and carried out in practice. The case studies presented in the book come from the fields of urban history, the history of trade, and global history including the history of cartography, but its analysis is equally relevant to other fields of inquiry.
This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to the theory and methodology of historical spatial analysis.
Supported by Open Access funds of the University of Erfur
Mental content : consequences of the embodied mind paradigm
The central difference between objectivist cognitivist semantics and embodied cognition consists in the fact that the latter is, in contrast to the former, mindful of binding meaning to context-sensitive mental systems. According to Lakoff/Johnson's experientialism, conceptual structures arise from preconceptual kinesthetic image-schematic and basic-level structures. Gallese and Lakoff introduced the notion of exploiting sensorimotor structures for higherlevel cognition. Three different types of X-schemas realise three types of environmentally embedded simulation: Areas that control movements in peri-personal space; canonical neurons of the ventral premotor cortex that fire when a graspable object is represented; the firing of mirror neurons while perceiving certain movements of conspecifics. ..
History, Space and Place
Spaces, too, have a history. And history always takes place in spaces. But what do historians mean when they use the word ""spaces""? And how can spaces be historically investigated?
Susanne Rau provides a survey of the history of Western concepts of space, opens up interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of space in fields ranging from physics and geography to philosophy and sociology, and explains how historical spatial analysis can be methodologically and conceptually conceived and carried out in practice. The case studies presented in the book come from the fields of urban history, the history of trade, and global history including the history of cartography, but its analysis is equally relevant to other fields of inquiry.
This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to the theory and methodology of historical spatial analysis.
Supported by Open Access funds of the University of Erfur
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