5,069 research outputs found

    Include 2011 : The role of inclusive design in making social innovation happen.

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    Include is the biennial conference held at the RCA and hosted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The event is directed by Jo-Anne Bichard and attracts an international delegation

    Organizational memory: the role of business intelligence to leverage the application of collective knowledge

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    Nowadays, the major challenge to organizations managers is that they must make appropriate decisions in a turbulent environment while it is hard to recognize whether information is good or bad, because actions resulting from wrong decisions may place the organization at risk of survive. That is why organizations managers try to avoid making wrong decisions. In order to improve this, managers should use collective knowledge and experiences shared through Organizational Memory (OM) effectively to reduce the rate of unsuccessful decision making. In this sense, Business Intelligence (BI) tools allow managers to improve the effectiveness of decision making and problem solving. In the light of these motivations, the aim of this chapter is to comprehend the role of BI systems in supporting OM effectively in real context of crowdsourcing academic initiative called CrowdUM.This work is financed by Fundos FEDER through the Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade - COMPETE and Fundos Nacionais through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under the Project: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-02267

    Memories of places. Creativity and Reality through the travel experience

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    The travel experience and the idea of collecting places, customs, habits and architectural references through travel notebooks may be one of the oldest (and current) ways in which architects assume the reality of cities, their present-day needs, requirements and contexts. How to store memories of places? How can be useful instruments in the construction of contemporary cities? Beyond technological innovations, how do memories collected in travel notebooks contribute in the way in which cities are constructed within today’s realities and particularities, without losing sight of its geographical, political, social and human context? In most urban places it is possible to recognize distinctive characteristics, and dynamics that inhabitants have established (eating sites, groceries, local businesses, emblematic spots), as well as the way to use collective and urban spaces. These urban transformations can constantly change and must be intertwined with people’ reality, their formal/informal context, habits and customs, but agreed and shared interventions are necessary for a proper guideline of the boundaries encompassing the community. Urban spaces are continuously developed by inhabitants, so their function is not only construction of buildings or public spaces generically, but is based on particular people’s needs, making collective spaces more accessible, proper and social: the reorganization of the barrio, as a living ecosystem. How are memories of places retrieve and re-interpreted in the comprehension of contemporary cities? An attempt to respond is through a comparative case study of two barrios: San Salvario (Torino, Italia), San Antonio (Cali, Colombia). The didactic travel is an opportunity to study how to capture, represent and transmit memories: travel notebooks are the medium by which places are gathered into memoirs. These memoirs are architectural ones, taken from public spaces, cultures and histories of the built environment, but also implies to learn and observe ethnographic, geographic, chromatic, pictorial, perceptual, and sensory phenomena. Collecting places in memories involves reflections and analysis of sites and cities. This paper argues that travel as a didactic experience and formative instrument, manages to transcend subjectivity. Besides creating awareness to appreciate architecture, cities and cultures, travel’s role is its restitution, written or drawn, in the construction of a critical and pedagogical view of the cit

    Globalising a design heritage strategy : from Finland's Artek to Turkey's Grand Bazaar

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    This doctoral study argues that the historical assets of design, engraved in living forms of collective memory, can be effectively engaged in the service of the appropriation and promotion of slower modes of consumption as opposed to the dominant and systematic novelty mechanism of fast fashion. The hypothesis is that a sustainability strategy employing design heritage and encouraging durable consumption can be helpful to avoid conflicts of interest between the transforming business community and its customers. Therefore, a heritage management strategy is proposed that emphasises feasibility and taps into existing socio- and politico-economic networks while suggesting positive changes in consumer behaviour. Due to the commercial and cultural popularity of permanent valorisation in design, this special design phenomenon is chosen as a specific field of design heritage. The potentials of enduring artefacts are recognised, and the study proposes further that these artefacts may become vehicles to achieve the strategy identified. To this end, the study employs an interdisciplinary review of several relevant literatures, transferring concepts and categories into the context of design heritage management. The findings of this review are further engaged in the analysis of a real-world case: the 2nd Cycle project by the iconic Finnish housewares company Artek. The analysis illustrates how the long-established company’s cultural and historical products are reproduced and capitalised in conformity with emerging consumer aspirations and needs. Drawing links between permanent valorisation, product longevity, and ultimately sustainable consumption, Artek’s project provides inspiring results how design heritage may lead to enhanced social good while taking advantage of new economic opportunities, know-how, and human capacities. Subsequently, special attention is given to the potential cross-cultural transferability of the heritage management strategy represented by this Finnish case. For this purpose, Artek’s case is taken as a cultivation of new sensibilities capable of translating a diversity of historical capital possessed by different cultures into heritage. Considering the constant growth of economic capacities and alarming levels of consumer spending, developing countries, known as emerging markets, are chosen as adaptation areas. Turkey, for example, whose historical, social, and cultural structure is distinct from that of Finland, provides a favourably challenging test environment for the thesis’ applicability. Discussing the feasibility and necessity of the growing heritage-oriented ethos in Turkey, the country is presented as representative of large emerging market segments with a theoretical application case, that of Istanbul’s monumental Grand Bazaar. Inspired by the Finnish case and developed further with additional insight from cultural heritage management studies in tourism environments, a specific design heritage management strategy is outlined for the bazaar. Following in-depth interviews with a range of professionals who make their living in the bazaar, and responding to their insights, the hypothetical strategy is aimed to synthesise the various interests of the bazaar’s large network of stakeholders while promoting durable consumption. Finally, a list of guiding principles of cross-cultural adaptation are drawn for future adopters attempting to apply this study’s findings to different heritage contexts on a global scale

    A General Framework for Accelerator Management Based on ISA Extension

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    Thanks to the promised improvements in performance and energy efficiency, hardware accelerators are taking momentum in many computing contexts, both in terms of variety and relative weight in the silicon area of many chips. Commonly, the way an application interacts with these hardware modules has many accelerator-specific traits and requires ad-hoc drivers that usually rely on potentially expensive system calls to manage accelerator resources and access orchestration. As a consequence, driver-based interfacing is far from uniform and can expose high latency, limiting the set of tasks suitable for acceleration. In this paper, we propose a uniform and low-latency interface based on Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) extension. All the previous studies that proposed extensions, were deeply tailored to address a single accelerator. One of the biggest disadvantages of those methods is their inability to scale. Adding more of these accelerators to one System-on-Chip (SoC) would result in ISA bloat, increasing power consumption and complexifying the decoding phase proportionally. Our proposed framework consists of a six-instruction ISA extension and the corresponding architectural support that implements the interface abstraction and the reservation logic at the hardware level. Our proposal allows controlling a broad class of integrated accelerators directly from the CPU. The proposed framework is ISA-independent, which means that it is applicable to all the existing ISAs. We implement it on the gem5 simulator by extending the RISC-V ISA. We evaluate it by simulating three compute-intensive accelerators and comparing our interfacing with a conventional driver-based one. The benchmarks highlight the performance benefits brought by our framework, with up to 10.38x speed up, as well as the ability to seamlessly support different accelerators with the same interface. The speed up advantage of our technique diminishes as the granularity of the workloads increases and the overhead for driver-based accelerators becomes less important. We also show that the impact of its hardware components on chip area and power consumption is limited

    IXIAM: ISA EXtension for Integrated Accelerator Management

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    During the last few years, hardware accelerators have been gaining popularity thanks to their ability to achieve higher performance and efficiency than classic general-purpose solutions. They are fundamentally shaping the current generations of Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), which are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. However, despite their widespread use, a standard, general solution to manage them while providing speed and consistency has not yet been found. Common methodologies rely on OS mediation and a mix of user-space and kernel-space drivers, which can be inefficient, especially for fine-grained tasks. This paper addresses these sources of inefficiencies by proposing an ISA eXtension for Integrated Accelerator Management (IXIAM), a cost-effective HW-SW framework to control a wide variety of accelerators in a standard way, and directly from the cores. The proposed instructions include reservation, work offloading, data transfer, and synchronization. They can be wrapped in a high-level software API or even integrated into a compiler. IXIAM features also a user-space interrupt mechanism to signal events directly to the user process. We implement it as a RISC-V extension in the gem5 simulator and demonstrate detailed support for complex accelerators, as well as the ability to specify sequences of memory transfers and computations directly from the ISA and with significantly lower overhead than driver-based schemes. IXIAM provides a performance advantage that is more evident for small and medium workloads, reaching around 90x in the best case. This way, we enlarge the set of workloads that would benefit from hardware acceleration

    The design of artifacts for augmenting intellect

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    Fifty years ago, Doug Engelbart created a conceptual framework for augmenting human intellect in the context of problem-solving. We expand upon Engelbart's framework and use his concepts of process hierarchies and artifact augmentation for the design of personal intelligence augmentation (IA) systems within the domains of memory, motivation, decision making, and mood. This paper proposes a systematic design methodology for personal IA devices, organizes existing IA research within a logical framework, and uncovers underexplored areas of IA that could benefit from the invention of new artifacts

    Supporting strategic design of workplace environments with case-based reasoning

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    Tourism and beyond: Commodification of communist memoryscapes in Central and East Europe

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    The aim of this dissertation is to shed light on the phenomenon of commodification of communist memoryscapes in Europe, exploring the main strategies and forms of urban and mnemonic re-branding of post-socialist capitals. Illuminating the variety of commercial solutions for dealing with “difficult” legacies of communism in Europe, the thesis aims to enhance our understanding of actors, processes and dynamics framing the contemporary engagement with communist urban heritage. Relying on grounded theory method, triangulated through multiple case study, participatory observation and netnography, the study examines patterns of convergence in spatial, mnemonic and narrative organisations of communist urban experiences. Elaborating commodification of (1) communist landmarks (iconic buildings), (2) suburban heritage (statues, parks), (3) underground spaces (communist bunkers) (4) cultural objects (museums of communism), (5) urban discourses (guided city tours) and (6) urban hospitality (communist restaurants), the analysis thus reveals different urban and narrative “commercial interventions” in post-communist urban landscape. Through the in-depth analysis of major communist museums, tours, landmarks, bunkers, peripheries and hospitality spaces across Central and East Europe, the dissertation accentuates similarities and divergences in contemporary discursive, spatial and commercial treatment of communism. It reveals particular mechanisms and outcomes of commodification, which emerges both as a strategy to “contain” communism and “re-pack” it for tourist consumption. Ultimately, the thesis argues that commodification of communism is the essential aspect of contemporary tourist narratives, curatorial practices and urban organisation of communist memoryscapes. It identifies and interprets urban, mnemonic, discursive and experiential manifestations of commodification, arguing that commercial engagement with communism fundamentally challenges the prevailing mechanisms for “coming to terms with the past.” It demonstrates that both suppliers and consumers of communist memoryscapes (co)produce and (co)participate in commodification process, most often through the interplay of tourism and entertainment industry. Finally, the study claims that commodification is reinforced through glocalisation, disneyfication and orientalisation of difficult heritage of communism, which further contribute to (re)locating specific urban context, (re)imagining particular urban history and generally changing the ways in which contemporary society values, exhibits and sources communism in urban space.El objetivo de esta disertación es arrojar luz sobre el fenómeno de la mercantilización de los paisajes de memoria comunistas en Europa, explorando las principales estrategias y formas de cambio de marca urbana y mnemotécnica de las capitales postsocialistas. Iluminando la variedad de soluciones comerciales para lidiar con los legados “difíciles” del comunismo en Europa, la tesis tiene como objetivo mejorar nuestra comprensión de los actores, procesos y dinámicas que enmarcan el compromiso contemporáneo con el patrimonio urbano comunista. Basándose en el método de la teoría fundamentada, triangulado a través del estudio de casos múltiples, la observación participativa y la netnografía, el estudio examina los patrones de convergencia en las organizaciones espaciales, mnemotécnicas y narrativas de las experiencias urbanas comunistas. Elaborando la mercantilización de (1) hitos comunistas (edificios icónicos), (2) patrimonio suburbano (estatuas, parques), (3) espacios subterráneos (bunkers comunistas) (4) objetos culturales (museos del comunismo), (5) discursos urbanos ( visitas guiadas por la ciudad) y (6) hospitalidad urbana (restaurantes comunistas), el análisis revela así diferentes “intervenciones comerciales” urbanas y narrativas en el paisaje urbano poscomunista. A través del análisis en profundidad de los principales museos, recorridos, puntos de referencia, búnkeres, periferias y espacios de hospitalidad comunistas en Europa Central y Oriental, la disertación acentúa las similitudes y divergencias en el tratamiento discursivo, espacial y comercial contemporáneo del comunismo. Revela mecanismos y resultados particulares de la mercantilización, que surge tanto como una estrategia para “contener” el comunismo como para “reempaquetarlo” para el consumo turístico. En última instancia, la tesis argumenta que la mercantilización del comunismo es el aspecto esencial de las narrativas turísticas contemporáneas, las practicas curatoriales y la organización urbana de los paisajes de memoria comunistas. Identifica e interpreta las manifestaciones urbanas, mnemotécnicas, discursivas y experienciales de la mercantilización, argumentando que el compromiso comercial con el comunismo desafía fundamentalmente los mecanismos predominantes para “llegar a un acuerdo con el pasado”. Demuestra que tanto los proveedores como los consumidores de paisajes de memoria comunistas (co)producen y (co)participan en el proceso de mercantilización, con mayor frecuencia a través de la interacción de la industria del turismo y elentretenimiento. Finalmente, argumento que la mercantilización se refuerza a través de la glocalización, disneyficación y orientalización de la difícil herencia del comunismo, lo que contribuye aún más a (re)ubicar un contexto urbano específico, (re)imaginar una historia urbana particular y, en general, cambiar las formas en las que la Sociedad contemporánea valora, exhibe y origina comunismo en el espacio urbano.Escuela de DoctoradoDoctorado en Arquitectur
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