Human factors in the design of sustainable built environments

Scientific research provides convincing evidence that climate change is having significant impacts on many aspects of life. In the built-environment domain, regulatory requirements are pushing the challenges of environmental, economic, and social sustainability at the core of the professional agenda, although the aims of carbon reduction and energy conservation are frequently given a priority over occupants' comfort, well-being, and satisfaction. While most practitioners declare to embrace sustainability as a driver of their professional approach, a general lack of integrated creative and technical skills hinders the design of buildings centred on articulate and comprehensive sustainability goals, encompassing, other than energy criteria, also human-centred and ethical values founded on competent and informed consideration of the requirements of the site, the programme, and the occupants. Built environments are designed by humans to host a range of human activities. In response, this article aims to endorse a sustainable approach to design founded on the knowledge arising from scholarly and evidence-based research, exploring principles and criteria for the creation and operation of human habitats that can respond to energy and legislative demands, mitigate their environmental impacts, and adapt to new climate scenarios, while elevating the quality of experience and delight to those occupying them

Taking a hike: Exploring leisure walkers embodied experiences

This paper uses walk along interviewing to investigate embodied experiences of walking on the South Downs Way, a long distance trail in southern England. Using a qualitative methodology - encompassing 93 walk-along interviews and auto-ethnographic reflections of two walker/researchers - it explores how walkers conceptualise their own walking experiences and captures this information while they are walking. It contributes to and extends the emerging body of literature which explores people’s experience, specifically aiming to develop a deeper understanding of leisure walking experiences in the dynamic space of the walk. It examines a range of bodily sensations and emotional states associated with the leisure walking experience in the context of temporal and environmental aspects, identifying those feelings that are innate and those which are mediated by external conditions. Current experiences intertwine with memories of other places and times in a process where connections are made between mind, body, the immediate physical environment, self and others, and disconnections from everyday life and the wider environment. These connections and disconnections create a sense of perspective, achievement and well-being

Sounding Situated Knowledges - Echo in Archaeoacoustics

This article proposes that feminist epistemologies via Donna Haraway's “Situated Knowledges” can be productively brought to bear upon theories of sonic knowledge production, as “sounding situated knowledges.” Sounding situated knowledges re-reads debates around the “nature of sound” with a Harawayan notion of the “natureculture of sound.” This aims to disrupt a traditional subject-object relation which I argue has perpetuated a pervasive “sonic naturalism” in sound studies. The emerging field of archaeoacoustics (acoustic archaeology), which examines the role of sound in human behaviour in archaeology, is theorized as an opening with potentially profound consequences for sonic knowledge production which are not currently being realized. The echo is conceived as a material-semiotic articulation, which akin to Haraway's infamous cyborg, serves as a feminist figuration which enables this renegotiation. Archaeoacoustics research, read following Haraway both reflectively and diffractively, is understood as a critical juncture for sound studies which exposes the necessity of both embodiedness and situatedness for sonic knowledge production. Given the potential opened up by archaeoacoustics through the figure of echo, a critical renegotiation of the subject-object relation in sound studies is suggested as central in further developing theories of sonic knowledge production

Into the divide: community identities and the visualisation of place

This article discusses the experience of place in a profoundly divided urban area of Sheffield. At a time when the gap between affluence and poverty has reached its widest point since the 1960s, this paper explores the relationship between individuals and their sense of place and of the trenchant divisions separating communities. The study employs various methods but centres upon the use of hand drawn maps; creating a dialogue between the interviewers and a number of local residents. These maps and the accompanying commentaries demonstrate the diverse individual sense of a particular place and a dialectical sense of space. The resulting picture is one of both the persistence of historical divisions, suggesting regulation and control through planning and policing, but also of complex entanglements of social identities, habitus and place which defy easy categorisiation

Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies

This paper argues for expanded listening in geography. Expanded listening addresses how bodies of all kinds, human and more-than-human, respond to sound. We show how listening can contribute to research on a wide range of topics, beyond enquiry where sound itself is the primary substantive interest. This is demonstrated through close discussion of what an amplified sonic sensibility can bring to three areas of contemporary geographical interest: geographies of landscape, of affect, and of geotechnologies

Proposition d'une nouvelle ostéotomie métatarsienne médiane: L'ostéotomie cervicale de raccourcissement axial (OCRA). Approche expérimentale comparative avec l'ostéotomie de Weil

The cervical shortening axial osteotomy, is a distal metatarsal osteotomy, preserving the joint, with a cylindrical piece of bone removed in the line of the metatarsal axis, and with the preservation of a stabilising bone block, on the head fragment. After a first mathematical and geometric analysis, this second experimental study on sawbones, was to compare Weil osteotomy, Weil osteotomy with resection of a bone slice on the proximal fragment, made after the proximal translation of the distal fragment, and the cervical shortening axial osteotomy. These were performed on 20 sawbones, divided into four groups: Weil osteotomies were performed in the first three groups: using a horizontal cut in group 1, a 10° oblique cut in group 2, and a 20° oblique cut in group 3; cervical shortening axial osteotomies were performed in group 4. In a second part, the Weil osteotomies were completed by bone slice resections on the proximal fragment. In each group, the head fragment was translated one centimeter proximally. The radiographic assessement used bony lanmarks to analyse morphological changes, and the projection of these landmarks on the horizontal line. The length, heigth, and declination angles variations were mesured. With an horizontal Weil osteotomy, we found no plantar displacement of the head, but an increased metatarsal declination angle, averaging 2.6°. In an oblique Weil osteotomy, head plantar displacement is associated with a greater metatarsal declination angle. For the 10° angle oblique oteotomy, the head's plantar displacement average 2.2 mm and the metatarsal declination angle 4.2° and for 20° angle oblique osteotomy, the head plantar displacement average 2.8 mm and the metatarsal declination angle 6.4°. The bone slice resection, made just after the proximal translation of the metatarsal head, in the Weil osteotomy, resulted in the correction of head plantar displacement and metatarsal angle modifications. For the 10° angle oblique Weil ostetomy, the head displacement is 1,8 mm dorsal, and the declination angle is reduce to 0.4°; and for an 20° oblique Weil osteotomy, the results are 2.2 mm for the head dorsal displacement, and 0.4° for the declination angle. In the shortening cervical axial osteotomy, the metatarsal head follow a dorsal displacement but also a plantar displacement secondary to the plantar bone block preserved on the distal fragment, resulting in a 1.2 mm dorsal position. The metatarsal declination angle is 1.6° greater

Proposition d'une nouvelle ostéotomie métatarsienne médiane: L'ostéotomie cervicale de raccourcissement axial (ORCA). Approche géométrique comparative avec l'ostéotomie de Weil

Lack of objective guidelines in surgical metatarsal osteotomies, justify this study's purpose that is to compare the Weil osteotomy, the Weil osteotomy with a slice of bone removed from the proximal fragment, and the axial osteotomy, through a mathematical geometric analysis. The cervical shortening axial osteotomy (CSAO) is an extraarticular axial osteotomy; its high stability is provided by retention of a plantar bone block on the distal fragment. In a right triangle, the hypotenuse is the metatarsal axis, one side is the horizontal plane, and the angle in between is the declination angle. For a 15° initial declination angle, and for 5 mm and 10 mm shortening, we calculate the length, heigth, and angle modifications. An horizontal Weil osteotomy cause a 1° to 2.5° change in plantar flexion. In an oblique Weil osteotomy the head's plantar displacement average 0.8 to 3.4 mm and the declination angle increase to 5.8°. The effects of a slice of bone removed from the proximal frgament in the Weil osteotomy are not the same if it was made before or after the head's proximal translation. Made before the head's translation, the resection of a slice of bone above the cephalic fragment, cause a plantar displacement, a plantar flexion of the metatarsal, and a great increase in the shortening effect. To be effective, it has to be done after the head's proximal translation. The advantages of the axial shortening osteotomy are the declination angle preservation, the dorsal head's displacement, from 1.5 to 3 mm. The vertical vector of a force "F" passing trouhg the metatarsal, is greater in a Weil osteotomy with plantar and proximal translation than in a theorical pure plantar translation osteotomy. The metatarsal plantar flexion angle increases the vertical vector force more than the head's plantar displacement