Designing a Travel Guide to the Un-Natural World: Exploring a Design-led Methodology

The analogy of designer as tourist in the un-natural world is used as an aid for thinking my way into the nature of design research. An exploration of how the design researcher, like a tourist, travels widely through the un-natural world of thought, theory and concept. If we are to design a travel guide for the un-natural world then what would this guide book look like, why do we need it and how could it work? The paper will propose that a ‘travel guide to the un-natural world’ in the form of a design-led methodology is needed for research into sustainable development and is useful not only for the design discipline but for the research community at large. These premises have been derived from the aptitude of the design process and the creative methods it employs to deal with the complex messiness of issues such as sustainability. Such a design-led methodology would be useful for the wider research community due to the integrative abilities of the design process and the trans-disciplinary scope of the tour through the un-natural world. Design-led methodology will be explored using examples from field work in Tumut (rural New South Wales, Australia) Keywords: Design Research, Design-Led Methods, Metadesign, Sustainability.</p

Imagining 'environment' in sustainable development

The paper presents an argument for a broader and more complex definition of environment than that currently offered in sustainable development discourse and practice. Sustainable development is rooted in dominant western rational and instrumental scientific representations of human-environment relationships. As such, it has been criticised as misrepresentative and meaningless for many of those for whom it is intended. Recent contributions by social scientists have emphasized the need to move beyond the narrow construction of the human-environment dichotomy found in western scientific rhetoric. These emerging ‘new ecologies’ advocate a re-imagining of human-environment relationships as holistic, connective, and relational, and as a product of direct perception and active engagement in the world. The Boumā National Heritage Park, Fiji, a community-based ecotourism initiative is presented as a case study to identify discrepancies between indigenous perceptions of the environment and those of formally educated western development practitioners, as well as the potential for ongoing convergence

A Systems Thinking Approach to Redesigning the Patient Experience to Reduce 30 Day Hospital Readmission

INTRODUCTION The cost of medical care is spiraling out of control, and one of the many reasons is lack of preventative care, poor communication to the patient and primary caregiver(s) both in an inpatient and outpatient setting. There are potentially many reasons for this cost escalation, one of the drivers of this cost is 30 day readmission after a hospitalization and this is what was examined in this analysis. The purpose of this paper in particular is to share what has been learned using a systems thinking approach to hospital readmissions and the patient experience. It is critical to understand the problems that occurred in the past. In addition, we will explain the methodology utilized and bring awareness to the iterative process. We will also demonstrate a suggested redesigned model

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Machinocene: Illusions of instrumental reason

In their seminal work, Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno interpreted capitalism as the irrational monetization of nature. In the present work, I analyze three 21st century concepts, Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Machinocene, in light of Horkheimer and Adorno’s arguments and recent arguments from the philosophy of biology. The analysis reveals a remarkable prescience of the term “instrumental reason”, which is present in each of the three concepts in a profound and cryptic way. In my interpretation, the term describes the propensity of science based on the notion of physicalism to interpret nature as the machine analyzable and programmable by the human reason. As a result, the Anthropocene concept is built around the mechanicist model, which may be presented as the metaphor of the car without brakes. In a similar fashion, the Machinocene concept predicts the emergence of the mechanical mind, which will dominate nature in the near future. Finally, the Capitalocene concept turns a perfectly rational ambition to expand knowledge into an irrational obsession with over-knowledge, by employing the institutionalized science as the engine of capitalism without brakes. The common denominator of all three concepts is the irrational propensity to legitimize self-destruction. Potential avenues for countering the effects of “instrumental reason” are suggested

Industrial waste management within manufacturing: a comparative study of tools, policies, visions and concepts

Industrial waste is a key factor when assessing the sustainability of a manufacturing process or company. A multitude of visions, concepts, tools, and policies are used both academically and industrially to improve the environmental effect of manufacturing; a majority of these approaches have a direct bearing on industrial waste. The identified approaches have in this paper been categorised according to application area, goals, organisational entity, life cycle phase, and waste hierarchy stage; the approaches have also been assessed according to academic prevalence, semantic aspects, and overlaps. In many cases the waste management approaches have similar goals and approaches, which cause confusion and disorientation for companies aiming to synthesise their management systems to fit their waste management strategy. Thus, a study was performed on how waste management approaches can be integrated to reach the vision of zero waste in manufacturing

The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place by Tom Bristow

Review of Tom Bristow\u27s The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place

Digital myths

Much of the early work on information theory was directed towards the study of the transmission of telegraph signals. These theoretical treatments lend themselves to descriptions of signals as digital phenomena they are much less convenient for dealing with descriptions of signals as analogue phenomena. Although attempts were made to accommodate analogue and digital signals in the same theory the results were elaborate, hard to follow and difficult to apply. Thus there remain incompatibilities between the common theoretical treatments of analogue and digital signals and hence difficulties in framing criteria for the comparison of analogue and digital techniques. In spite of the difficulty of any formalised comparison it is frequently presumed that digital systems offer greater capacity, better quality, better accuracy, versatility, freedom from error and greater realism in the effects they produce. Digital systems have also been strongly supported as candidates for human biological mechanisms and thus by implication are, seen by some, to be natural. These myths about digital systems have breached the engineers's linguistic closures and have become commonplace. With their promise of perfection, digital systems have become symbols of the modern, the progressive and the revolutionary. Engineers caught up in this tide have come to extoll uncritically particular claimed virtues of going digital so that other options are treated as obsolescent . But through its common usage the word digital is losing its discriminating power and trapped in an image of a controllable world it is becoming a metaphor for modernist aesthetic

Nine Quick Tips for Analyzing Network Data

These tips provide a quick and concentrated guide for beginners in the analysis of network data