Landscape architecture and health

Swedes are living increasingly longer lives, but the number of years lived in good health is decreasing. The present doctoral dissertation is focused on the threat to Swedish public health that is constituted by aches and pain and various types of mental illnesses, of which fatigue reactions, often called ”burnout syndromes,” are increasing most rapidly. Besides the personal suffering involved, the costs of increased ill health constitute a threat to the welfare of Swedish society. According to the Swedish government, good health has become a resource – perhaps even the country’s most important resource for sustainable development. Today, several scientific disciplines consider health to be a positive and holistic state encompassing the individual’s entire life situation: biological, cultural, social and not least environmental aspects. With the Swedish Parliament’s adoption of the public health bill Public Health Objectives, public health work in Sweden is to be based on the idea of finding different societal factors that promote good health on equal terms for the entire population. The present doctoral dissertation focuses on a health factor represented by different types of natural environments. The dissertation is based on two studies of two different types of health-promoting natural environments: Healing gardens – Improvement of ill health Urban green spaces – Maintenance and fortification of good health Healing gardens are gardens that are purposely designed to promote health among a certain group of patients. The dissertation focuses on the type of healing garden that is specially intended for patients suffering from fatigue reactions or burnout syndromes. Interest in healing gardens is spreading rapidly throughout the world. However, both in Sweden and in other countries, ”healing gardens” are being laid out that do not actually possess health-promoting qualities. In order for health to actually be improved, purposeful design based on the patient group’s special needs is required. There is a great need for scientific knowledge concerning how these gardens should be designed. For a long time past in our history, the importance of city greenery for city dwellers’ health and wellbeing has been pointed out. In the present dissertation, urban green spaces – i.e. greenery in the city such as parks, green areas, schoolyards and gardens belonging to a house – are viewed as healthpromoting elements of city planning. Interest in how urban green spaces can maintain and fortify human health is spreading among scientists, architects, politicians and the public. Despite this interest, the problem remains of how urban green spaces should be planned and designed so as to attract the urban population. The dissertation has an applied perspective and is aimed at both scientists and practitioners. It presents findings from two different studies, one on how healing gardens may be designed for people with burnout syndromes and the other on how urban green spaces may be planned from a health-promoting perspective. The overall purpose is, thus, that the dissertation should contribute to the evidence-based design and planning of health-promoting outdoor environments

Electronic Identity in Europe: Legal challenges and future perspectives (e-ID 2020)

This deliverable presents the work developed by the IPTS eID Team in 2012 on the large-encompassing topic of electronic identity. It is structured in four different parts: 1) eID: Relevance, Le-gal State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives; 2) Digital Natives and the Analysis of the Emerging Be-havioral Trends Regarding Privacy, Identity and Their Legal Implications; 3) The "prospective" use of social networking services for government eID in Europe; and 4) Facial Recognition, Privacy and Iden-tity in Online Social Networks.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Cultivating a participatory design practice in architecture: a case study of Hong Kong Housing Authority

Community participation in urban design and planning is slowly emerging in Hong Kong as the Government increasingly adopts and recognizes the importance of bottom-up community values in the practice of informing, consulting and involving the community. This paper provides a framework that emphasizes the importance of collaboration and community-based initiatives to reconcile different interests and achieve a balanced vision for the design of the city. The fundamental objective is to ensure an increase sense of community belonging, responsibility and civic pride in improving the overall quality of life. The Lam Tin Estate case study not only demonstrates how the Government is becoming more responsive to the need of consulting with the public and relevant stakeholders to build a consensus prior to the implementation stage, but also illustrates how community participation empowers key stakeholders to take ownership in designing and planning their built environment

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value

AI for the Common Good?! Pitfalls, challenges, and Ethics Pen-Testing

Recently, many AI researchers and practitioners have embarked on research visions that involve doing AI for "Good". This is part of a general drive towards infusing AI research and practice with ethical thinking. One frequent theme in current ethical guidelines is the requirement that AI be good for all, or: contribute to the Common Good. But what is the Common Good, and is it enough to want to be good? Via four lead questions, I will illustrate challenges and pitfalls when determining, from an AI point of view, what the Common Good is and how it can be enhanced by AI. The questions are: What is the problem / What is a problem?, Who defines the problem?, What is the role of knowledge?, and What are important side effects and dynamics? The illustration will use an example from the domain of "AI for Social Good", more specifically "Data Science for Social Good". Even if the importance of these questions may be known at an abstract level, they do not get asked sufficiently in practice, as shown by an exploratory study of 99 contributions to recent conferences in the field. Turning these challenges and pitfalls into a positive recommendation, as a conclusion I will draw on another characteristic of computer-science thinking and practice to make these impediments visible and attenuate them: "attacks" as a method for improving design. This results in the proposal of ethics pen-testing as a method for helping AI designs to better contribute to the Common Good.Comment: to appear in Paladyn. Journal of Behavioral Robotics; accepted on 27-10-201

Strengthen the Architecture Principle Definition and Its Characteristics: A Survey Encompassing 27 Years of Architecture Principle Literature

Although architecture principles are important in the implementation of information systems requirements, empirical evidence of the effect of architecture principles is lacking. Before actually conducting the empirical research, it is important to have a solid definition and description of the research object, i.e. the architecture principle. In this paper, we strengthen both the definition of the architecture principle and the description of its characteristics. With a model based analysis we investigated 27 years of literature on architecture principles and eliminated inaccuracies and incompleteness. This definition and description provides a basis for determining the impact of using architecture principles during the implementation of the information systems requirements in our next step of research

A DESIGN FRAMEWORK FOR SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE

Aristotle theorized, \u27The whole is more than the sum of its parts.\u27 Design engineers often overlook this simple philosophy. We employ a reductionist approach when designing the built environment: engineering solutions for the individual parts rather than the system as a whole, creating and exacerbating problems in the process. A whole system, interdisciplinary approach that considers the interrelatedness of global issues is increasingly recognized as essential to finding truly sustainable engineering solutions (NSB, 2007). However, both the precise nature of this whole systems approach, and the best ways to incorporate it in engineering education remain undefined. To address this gap in knowledge, this research: (1) methodically reviewed the literature to define and unify the general principles of whole systems design; and (2) used the literature to develop a conceptual framework for whole systems design for sustainable infrastructure. A systematic literature review guided by a predefined protocol used 13 search terms spanning the engineering, architecture, and planning disciplines to identify components of the whole systems framework. Sources identified in the literature review fell under five primary categories: sustainable development; architecture, planning, and urban design; engineering, environmental management and business; and systems thinking. Principles were extracted from the resources, empirically coded, and organized into a framework using concept mapping. The resulting framework was organized into three overarching categories: design processes, design principles, and design methods, with a total of 20 principles, or components of whole systems design. It combines the theories, perspectives, and practices of multiple design disciplines and experts making it germane for applications of design ranging from the microscopic level of a chemical, to the macroscopic level of a city, for example. Organizing the literature surrounding whole systems design aids in building consensus around the defining elements and sets the stage for future research on the subject