Do Economics Departments Improve After They Appoint a Top Scholar as Chairperson?

There has been almost no research into what makes an effective chairperson in a university department. This paper constructs a historical longitudinal dataset on economics departments in 58 US research universities. It documents evidence that a department’s research output tends to improve substantially when the incoming department Chair is himself or herself an outstanding scholar (in particular, is highly cited). The analysis adjusts for a set of other possible influences, including the standing of the department, university resources, the previous Chair, the trend in the department’s productivity, and time-lags. Possible interpretations, and implications for future research, are discussed

High volume ergonomic simulation of chairs

To understand what makes a chair comfortable or practical we need to test a large number of chairs, both good and bad. Due to the numbers involved we cannot achieve this with physical testing. Instead we use simpli ed ergonomic simulations. The sim- ulations presented here produce pressure maps within the range given the literature, along with several other measures of comfort and practicality. This was done sub- stantially faster than examples in the literature, permitting collection of thousands of results

Beyond Japanese minimalistic versatility

Due to advances in industrial development, we are now living in an extremely consumeristic world. Every day, large volumes of products are purchased while others are thrown away. At the same time, consumers expect products to add value to their lives beyond mere aesthetics and basic functionality. In particular, the market for mass-produced furniture has grown oversaturated in recent decades. Thus, it is very difficult for designers to make a product that is sufficiently different from what already exists. However, regardless of this state of excess, superficial novelty designs are cast into the limelight every year in Milan and throughout the world. Whenever I visit design fairs I have to question whether people truly need new chairs that appear only nominally different from what already exists. Are these products really improving the quality of our lives and do we still need new chair designs? This Master’s thesis approaches this question by studying the context rather than only looking at the problem from an aesthetic angle, applying the minimalistic thinking of Japanese product design. The methodology investigates the shared values in Japanese and Finnish culture in order to create a new seating product that is both relevant and meaningful in the context of contemporary furniture design. The thesis first delves into the changing lifestyle in Japan over time and how this affected the development of modern furniture. In many cases, the Japanese brand of minimalistic design thinking is an effective method of finding solutions, because simplification is one way to improve user experience. This thesis aims to discover ways that neutrality in design can be utilised to create new value within product design in general and chair typologies in particular. This thesis project attempts to find a new relationship between a chair and its end user. Furthermore, my intention is to make a product possessing characteristics that makes the user want to keep it for longer and with greater intimacy. Thus, this thesis explores the simplicity that comes from Japanese tradition, and its application to today’s world and its myriad challenges. Even though the results may not be a perfectly formulated innovative design, the entire project can be seen as an experiment for a new chair typology rooted in the principles of Japanese minimalism

The Way Things Are

What motivated the chair that hooked my bag today? What was in it for the bag? I resist acknowledging that the objects inhabiting our lives are inanimate. By considering the objects' needs, and denying our needs for those objects, they can expose a life and language of their own. A sagging couch expresses its physical exhaustion from the continuous support of lounging bodies. A coffee table makes its hostility clear to the car keys by continuously throwing them over its edge and onto the floor. By carefully observing the relationships between furniture, knick-knacks, and utilitarian objects, I have found them to reveal less about the lives of their owners than they do about their own hidden lives. These objects present evidence of the physical and psychological states of objects that often go unnoticed. In this realm, objects cause unexpected encounters, such as the chair that hooked my bag. When these interactions are revealed, we look at things and they look back.</p

Physical and Psychological Balancing Act: Is Stability Desirable?

Recent studies have conveyed that the physical instability of a person would alter the way they thought about other people’s relationships and the traits people seek in romantic partners. These studies also show that cordial physical experiences can impact people’s views of relationship stability (Kille, Forest, & Wood, 2013). Confessing love for a significant other while seated in an unstable condition can alter how they truly feel if they were to be sitting in a stable condition (Forest, Kille, Wood, & Stehouwer, 2015). Similarly, one study showed that being in a position that makes someone feel uncomfortable can influence what people seek in relationships (Kille, Forest, & Wood, 2013). Even something such as physical temperature effects people’s perceptions of others (Williams & Bargh, 2008). We were interested to see if manipulating a chair and table to be unstable would change the participant’s views of whether or not the likelihood of famous couple’s relationships would dissolve within a range of years. We hypothesized that being physically unstable would cause the participant to perceive other people’s relationships as unstable. We also hypothesized that the qualities people are attracted to can be modified due to physical instability

Affordances and the Potential for Architecture

Affordances and the Potential for Architecture divulges our engagement with the built environment is a deeply rooted experience. In a biological and philosophical sense, it reveals that the mind is inseparable from the body, just as the body is inseparable from its environment. The world displays itself before us as rife with potential movements, activities, engagements, for which we continuously rehearse the myriad possibilities and choose the best course of action in the moment. It defines our phenomenological natures through this readiness-for-action, and thereby suggests we will improve the spaces, buildings, and landscapes that we inhabit by mastering how we enact and perceive them. This concise manuscript proposes affordances as an important contribution to thinking about architecture, space, and perception. To be sure, Architecture is not an object but something we do. The argument opens with Andrea Jelić’s pervasive question, “How does architecture afford being-in-the-world?” Identifying humans’ modern conceit of separating the mind from the body and the body from its situation—she frames our scaffold for experience alternately as one of co-dependence rather than of abstraction. Our perception nests and centers the sensory body in the unfolding discoveries of science’s new models of cognition, along the ecological thesis of James Gibson’s affordances. Likewise, Sarah Robinson, in “Articulating Affordances: Towards a New Theory of Design,” demonstrates that one size never fits all. Even as our bodies are equally constituted and share much in common, it is the specificity of differences between us that should instruct designers. There is no “average” body size for women nor a standard size of fighter pilot. Instead, there is a double entendre which asks desingers to understand perception as the confluence of varying influences, all the while considering the particularities of an individual. In architecture, a theory of affordances appreciates that while the rocking chair will always provide for rocking, its occupation depends on location and the frame of mind of the person so absorbed. Such sensory partaking in life, like rocking in a chair, is the material beauty of an architectural moment. It is the rocking chair which animates the porch. In “Just What Can Architects Afford?” Harry Mallgrave claims that after decades of architects reducing form to conceptual gamesmanship, one has to raise the question of where has this left architectural practice? Has it improved our cities or our houses? In the face of the mounting evidence to the contrary, and in view of the complexity of information age real life, wants, and desires, shall architects mindlessly follow the old Modernist track? The new biological models reveal that our engagement with buildings is “a whole-body experience,” one grounded not only in our multisensory, emotional, and visceral responses to the world but also in the phenomenal or “lived” nature of our being. Standing against the hollowing of human nature in contemporary digital practice, Mallgrave offers the lesson that we are indeed active agents in the culture that we create, and this built world can indeed be attuned to our biological and social natures. Beauty is something we do, an expression of the vital paradisiacal instinct grounded in human nature. James Hamilton, to wit asks, “How do Appreciators and Designers Discover Affordances?” He assigns to himself the difficult task of arbitrating for the ‘user,’ who might appreciate a building, while at the same time distrusting the designer to grasp the real intention of the things they make. He does so by examining Gibson’s claims for affordances and questioning the basis for understanding how objects appear to us or are useful within a specific environment. It seems that what something affords has to do with the experience or understanding you bring to the artifact and moment. You have to see a chair as a chair in order to sit upon it. A secondary and more difficult notion here is that even if a designer makes a chair, it may still be at odds with the peculiarities of the individual. As Dr. Hamilton concludes, “There is no shortcut to understanding on the part of appreciators, and none on the part of designers who design things for them.” Architects say they must educate their clients, yet in order to make this strategy work, designers must be better educated in the needs, wants, and desires of their clients. Affordances are a way to understand the environmental actions and behaviors of our species, while recognizing that which makes us humans of individual needs. One size never fits all, although it begins in our mutual humanity and dependable biology. Taken in sum, these essays consider the model of affordances within the context of architecture and provide a valuable contribution to this discussion of how to conceive, think, and better attune the human organism with the environment in which we dwell.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1036/thumbnail.jp

Object Language/On Defining Sculpture

Object Language In the current era we in the Western, developed world, have almost universal free and uninhibited access to almost every piece of information in existence. Increasingly, regardless of the source, material presented to us as fact has become increasingly suspect. Together, these two things mean this endless stream of data is useless. The question is how to combat this decline, how to reverse the process of a meaningless, constant data-dump. The answer lies in the language used to communicate information. Language is the means by which we communicate complex ideas and knowledge from person to person. Language is something ubiquitous in our society, we see it, we hear it, it is so constant we do not even consider it as a part of the concepts it is used to convey. Altering language is one of the subtlest ways that information can still be obfuscated. Sculpture has the capability to reframe its own context. This is the great privilege evidenced numerous times by such works as Duchamp’s Fountain and enumerated by prominent art historians. Transforming something into sculpture implies that the purpose of the work is, at least in part, to reframe the subject matter of the piece. Translating language into sculpture is an effort to reframe this system. The process takes that which is recognizable and readily consumable and obfuscates it, putting barriers between us, the reader, and the idea expressed. That which is freely given is valueless, easily discarded, and ignored. By transforming the content into sculpture the idea is elevated, made enigmatic, even esoteric. The ideas in the context of this show are not freely given. They have been rendered inaccessible and there must be effort expended to understand the message. These ideas must be earned. This makes them more valuable and much harder to ignore or discard. Information is the most powerful tool we have, its possession saves us from the mistakes of the past, it is what guides us through our present, and it is what ensures our future. When information becomes valueless it is altogether too easy for it to be taken away; we lose the most important tool we have in self determination. The supplemental images are of the art exhibition entitled Object Language, produced by the artist, that this thesis is a companion to