United Villages: A Case Study on Building Materials Reuse in Portland, Oregon

In 2003, building-related construction and demolition (C&D) debris totaled more than 164 million tons a year, up from 136 million tons a year in 1993.1 The largest share of this debris comes from building demolitions (53%), followed by building remodeling and renovation (38%) and finally construction (9%).2 Together, it comprises nearly 40 percent of the combined C&D and municipal solid waste stream.3 Landfilling this material incurs a significant economic cost. In 2004, the national average landfill tipping fee was $35 per ton,4 putting the national bill for landfilling construction and demolition debris at something on the order of$5.7 billion.Moreover, landfilling this debris also generates a considerable environmental cost. Landfill space is used up and fossil fuels are expended to transport and store debris; fossil fuels are used, natural resources depleted, and toxins generated in the production and transport of replacement materials. An environmental cost calculator prepared by the Deconstruction Institute and the University of Florida provides some examples:5Some 33 million tons of wood-related construction and demolition debris are buried each year in the US, releasing about 5 million tons of carbon equivalent in the form of methane gas. These greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to the annual emissions of 3.7 million cars.The average (2,000 square foot) American home, if demolished, would produce 10,000 cubic feet of debris. Recycling the steel and plastics in it would save almost 3,000 pounds of CO2 emissions. Salvaging the wood could yield 6,000 board feet of reusable lumber - equivalent to saving 33 mature trees.The building materials in the average American home contain about 892 million Btu of embodied energy -- the total amount of energy used to produce, transport and assemble the materials into a home. This amount is equivalent to 7,826 gallons of gasoline. Reusing or recycling these materials would recapture much of this embodied energy rather than wasting it.One year of construction and demolition debris is enough to build a wall 30 feet high and 30 feet thick around the entire coast of the continental United States (4,993 miles long).Lastly, landfilling this debris represents an opportunity cost for the many people and organizations that could have used the materials if they had been salvaged

Building and exploiting context on the web

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Design Research For Personal Information Management Systems To Support Undergraduate Students

This dissertation investigated the personal information management (PIM) behaviors and practices of undergraduate college students during a four month academic semester period. Qualitative data on the day-to-day PIM practices for 15 students enrolled in an honors biology class were collected through in-depth observations and interviews. Four students experimented with MyLifeBits--a next-generation PIM system developed at Microsoft Research. A participatory design session involving six students explored and identified new directions for PIM design. Analysis of the field data revealed that students engage regularly in project management activities, and their work is often highly collaborative. Students were observed to have difficulty with core PIM activities, such as managing tasks and reminders (and both PIM and technical skills vary widely among students). Students were observed to manage a diverse array of information formats, applications, and media, which are rarely integrated. Gaps in understanding and awareness among students and instructors were also noted. MyLifeBits was found to be intuitive and effective for visual browsing and refinding, although specific elements of the MyLifeBits user interface could likely be improved to support efficient task completion. The MyLifeBits system includes annotation, collection building, and other features that may support new approaches for making order and stimulating reflection. Observations of student usage suggested further design modifications to improve these features and supporting user interfaces. Implications for future research and design include: Incorporating social awareness and communication into PIM systems to help reduce gaps in understanding and facilitate reflection; integrating collaboration technologies into PIM systems to support students' highly collaborative work practices; providing tools to stimulate reflection (e.g., personal analytics) and create reflective artifacts (e.g., journals, multimedia scrapbooks); shifting the focus of design to outcomes (such as, "getting my assignment done on time, and in the way the teacher expects") that PIM supports rather than the PIM process itself; and developing ways to scaffold students' learning of PIM skills, such as metadata creation, project analysis and management, collaboration, and reflection

Digital craftsmanship: practitioners’ principles and their significance for defining a community of practice

Through the last two decades the spectrum of artefacts produced at the intersection of digital and hand-making processes has increased, seeing novel artefacts emerging under the umbrella of digital crafts. However, the challenge remains to specify a distinct set of shared characterising principles able to describe digital craft practitioners’ ethos as a community. Through the identification of shared principles practitioners could start more easily defining their community, developing an affinity among each other, and possibly interacting with other experts in the field – which is argued to be fundamental to ensure future acquisition, transfer, and preservation of tacit knowledge. This work explores the landscape of digital craftsmanship within Design Research and practice-based communities, highlighting the disparate backgrounds of digital craft practitioners. A combination of ethnographic, auto ethnographic, and paraethnographic approaches were adopted to articulate underlying principles by which digital craft practitioners can be addressed as a community of practice with shared motivations and ethos. Central to this study is the use of Kelly’s Repertory Grid framework, through which the researcher supported and facilitated a set of diverse expert practitioners to reflect on a range of examples of digital crafts and making processes. Through the insights obtained using these methods, and supported by theoretical debates unpacked through a critical contextual review, three principles currently shared among digital craft practitioners are tentatively proposed as a key contribution from this research: (1) digital craft practitioner’s nurture creative complex imitative learning through craft material knowledge, (2) they strongly believe aspects of the making- process need to include mostly “polymorphic” actions as opposed to “mimeomorphic” sequences, and (3) their main motivation is bound to the making process as it expresses the practitioners’ material contributory expertise–rather than the reaction or experience their outputs could elicit in viewers/users. These principles offer a definition of the community considering digital craft practitioners’ perspectives, providing the opportunity for practitioners and several stakeholder groups to engage with a provisional description of the community. Moreover, they set the basis for future research in the field and reflections on digital craftsmanship as a form of both explicit and tacit knowledge

Reimagining the Digital Monograph: Design Thinking to Build New Tools for Researchers, A JSTOR Labs Report

Scholarly books are increasingly available in digital form, but the online interfaces for using these books often allow only for the browsing of PDF files. JSTOR Labs, an experimental product-development group within the not-for-profit digital library JSTOR, undertook an ideation and design process to develop new and different ways of showing scholarly books online, with the goal that this new viewing interface should be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement for any scholarly book that is already available in PDF form. This paper documents that design process, including the recommendations of a working group of scholars, publishers, and librarians convened by JSTOR Labs and the Columbia University Libraries in October 2016. The prototype monograph viewer developed through this process—called “Topicgraph”—is described herein and is freely available online at https://labs.jstor.org/topicgraph

Social Feedback: Social Learning from Interaction History to Support Information Seeking on the Web

Information seeking on the Web has become a central part of many daily activities. Even though information seeking is extremely common, there are many times when these tasks are unsuccessful, because the information found is less than ideal or the task could have been completed more efficiently. In unsuccessful information-seeking tasks, there are often other people who have knowledge or experience that could help improve task success. However, information seekers do not typically look for help from others, because tasks can often be completed alone (even if inefficiently). One of the problems is that web tools provide people with few opportunities to learn from one another’s experiences in ways that would allow them to improve their success. This dissertation presents the idea of social feedback. Social feedback is based on the theory of social learning, which describes how people learn from observing others. In social feedback, observational learning is enabled through the mechanism of interaction history – the traces of activity people create as they interact with the Web. Social feedback systems collect and display interaction history to allow information seekers to learn how to complete their tasks more successfully by observing how other people have behaved in similar situations. The dissertation outlines the design of two social-feedback systems, and describes two studies that demonstrate the real world applicability and feasibility of the idea. The first system supports global learning, by allowing people to learn new search skills and techniques that improve information seeking success in many different tasks. The second system supports local learning, in which people learn how to accomplish specific tasks more effectively and more efficiently. Two further studies are conducted to explore potential real-world challenges to the successful deployment of social feedback systems, such as the privacy concerns associated with the collection and sharing of interaction history. These studies show that social feedback systems can be deployed successfully for supporting real world information seeking tasks. Overall, this research shows that social feedback is a valuable new idea for the social use of information systems, an idea that allows people to learn from one another’s experiences and improve their success in many common real-world tasks

Using eye tracking for evaluation of information visualisation in web search interfaces

Search result organization and presentation is an important component of a web search system, and can have a substantial impact on the ability of users to find useful information. Most web search result interfaces include textual information, including for example the document title, URL, and a short query-biased summary of the content. Recent studies have developed various novel visual summaries, aiming to improve the effectiveness of search results. In this thesis, the impact and efficacy of presenting additional visual summaries are investigated through a series of four studies. User interaction with the search results was captured using eye tracking data. In the first study we compare the effectiveness of three publicly available search interfaces for supporting navigational search tasks. The three interfaces varied primarily in the proportion of visual versus textual cues that were used to display a search result. Our analysis shows that users' search completion time varies greatly among interfaces, and an appropriate combination of textual and visual information leads to the shortest search completion time and the least number of wrong answers. Another outcome of this experiment is the identification of factors that should be accounted for in subsequent, more controlled, experiments with visual summaries, including the size of the visual summaries and interface design. An understanding of the features and limitations of the eye tracker, particularly for IR studies, was also obtained. To obtain a richer understanding of a user's information seeking strategies and the impact of presenting additional visual summaries, five interfaces were designed: text-only, thumbnail, image, tag and visual snippet. In the second study, fifty participants carried out searches on five informational topics, using the five different interfaces. Findings show that visual summaries significantly impact on the behaviour of users, but not on their performance when predicting the relevance of answer resources. In the third study, fifty participants carried out five navigational topics using the five different interfaces. The results show that apart from the salient image interface, users perform statistically significantly better in terms of time required and effort required to answer given navigational search topics when additional visual summaries are presented. The fourth study was conducted with both navigational and informational topics, for a more detailed comparison between the best-performing interfaces identified in the previous studies: salient images for informational searches, and thumbnails for navigational searches. The findings confirm our previous results. Overall, the salient image interface can significantly increase user performance with informational topics, while thumbnails can help users to predict relevant answers, in a significantly shorter time, with navigational search topics

The Antelope

https://openspaces.unk.edu/unkantelope/1364/thumbnail.jp

Understanding search

This thesis provides a framework for information retrieval based on a set of models which together illustrate how users of search engines come to express their needs in a particular way. With such insights, we may be able to improve systems’ capabilities of understanding users’ requests and through that eventually the ability to satisfy their needs. Developing the framework necessitates discussion of context, relevance, need development, and the cybernetics of search, all of which are controversial topics. Transaction log data from two enterprise search engines are analysed using a specially developed method which classifies queries according to what aspect of the need they refer to