Facing the Fourth Industrial Revolution: empowering (human) design agency and capabilities through experimental learning

This article identifies and describes the transformation of designer skills within the Great Transformation (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014) as defined by many economists and sociologists. The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2014) is a paradigm shift enabled by the convergence of technological changes - biotech, nanotech, 3D printing, robotics, big data and AI - that significantly influence the nature of work, the design and materialization of products and services, as well as their market, their structure, and their relations with human agents. This systemic process also changes the design field, its cultural and socio-economic structures, its traditional domains, and its consolidated practices. We witness both new opportunities for, but threats to, the conventional system of human imaginative and operational capacities that are changing how they can be learned. The re-discussion of the design(er) role affects the structure and meaning of the discipline, as well as the processes, places, and capacities that can generate learning. Design education is a core component of this change. It is so for those who will be shortly become designers and for retrofitting the knowledge and skills of practitioners and educators. This article reviews the principal studies and theories on the transformation of the production system and the market. Its focus is on the structural factors which enable identification of the leading transformational drivers of the experimental-experiential learning which will become the basis upon which changes in design education and design/designer skills will be defined considering the growth of open and distributed socio-technical systems in our contemporary society

Facing the Fourth Industrial Revolution: empowering (human) design agency and capabilities through experimental learning

This article identifies and describes the transformation of designer skills within the Great Transformation (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014) as defined by many economists and sociologists. The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2014) is a paradigm shift enabled by the convergence of technological changes - biotech, nanotech, 3D printing, robotics, big data and AI - that significantly influence the nature of work, the design and materialization of products and services, as well as their market, their structure, and their relations with human agents. This systemic process also changes the design field, its cultural and socio-economic structures, its traditional domains, and its consolidated practices. We witness both new opportunities for, but threats to, the conventional system of human imaginative and operational capacities that are changing how they can be learned. The re-discussion of the design(er) role affects the structure and meaning of the discipline, as well as the processes, places, and capacities that can generate learning. Design education is a core component of this change. It is so for those who will be shortly become designers and for retrofitting the knowledge and skills of practitioners and educators. This article reviews the principal studies and theories on the transformation of the production system and the market. Its focus is on the structural factors which enable identification of the leading transformational drivers of the experimental-experiential learning which will become the basis upon which changes in design education and design/designer skills will be defined considering the growth of open and distributed socio-technical systems in our contemporary society

Efficient double glycoconjugation to naturalize high molecular weight disperse dyes

Commercially available Disperse Orange 29 (1a) and Disperse Red 1 (2a) were elaborated to glycoconjugated species, following a new version of a previously-described ‘naturalisation’ procedure. Glutamic acid was chosen to achieve a double glycoconjugation, which is essential to give to the original disperse dye a water solubility suitable for reaching optimal dyeing conditions. UV–vis plot of the ‘naturalised’ species showed negligible differences when compared to those of the commercial dye

LACTOSE TO NATURALIZE TEXTILE DYES

Many natural dyes, for example carminic acid, are soluble in water. We present a simple strategy to naturalize synthetic azadyes through their linkage with lactose to induce their water solubility. The dyeing process of textile fibres then becomes possible in water without additives such as surfactants and mordants, which result in products that are difficult to eliminate. Glyco-azadyes (GADs) we are presenting here are obtained through a diether linker to bond the azadye and the sugar. Tinctorial tests were carried out with fabrics containing wool, polyester, cotton, nylon, and acetate. GADs were found to be multipurpose and capable of dyeing many fabrics efficiently under mild conditions

Far-Infrared Radiative Properties of Water Vapor and Clouds in Antarctica

Abstract Water vapor and clouds are among the most important greenhouse components whose radiative features cover all the broad spectral range of the thermal emission of the atmosphere. Typically more than 40% of the total thermal emission of Earth occurs in the far-infrared (FIR) spectral region from 100 to 667 cm−1 (wavelengths from 100 to 15 µm). Nevertheless, this spectral region has not ever been fully covered down to 100 cm−1 by space missions, and only a few ground-based experiments exist because of the difficulty of performing measurements from high altitude and very dry locations where the atmosphere is sufficiently transparent to observe the FIR emission features. To cover this lack of observations, the Italian experiment "Radiative Properties of Water Vapor and Clouds in Antarctica" has collected a 2-yr dataset of spectral measurements of the radiance emitted by the atmosphere and by clouds, such as cirrus and polar stratospheric clouds, from 100 to 1,400 cm−1 (100–7 µm of wavelength), including the underexplored FIR region, along with polarization-sensitive lidar observations, daily radiosondes, and other ancillary information to characterize the atmosphere above the site. Measurements have been performed almost continuously with a duty cycle of 6 out of 9 h, from the Italian–French base of Concordia at Dome C over the Antarctic Plateau at 3,230 m MSL, in all-sky conditions since 2012. Because of the uniqueness of the observations, this dataset will be extremely valuable for evaluating the accuracy of atmospheric absorption models (both gas and clouds) in the underexplored FIR and to detect possible daily, seasonal, and annual climate signatures

Petrogenesis of Mediterranean lamproites and associated rocks: the role of overprinted metasomatic events in the postcollisional lithospheric upper mantle

High-MgO lamproite and lamproite-like (i.e. lamprophyric) ultrapotassic rocks are recurrent in the Mediterranean and surrounding regions. They are associated in space and time with ultrapotassic shoshonites and high-K calc-alkaline rocks. This magmatism is linked with the geodynamic evolution of the westernmost sector of the Alpine–Himalayan collisional margin, which followed the closure of the Tethys Ocean. Subduc- tion-related lamproites, lamprophyres, shoshonites and high-K calc-alkaline suites were emplaced in the Medi- terranean region in the form of shallow level intrusions (e.g. plugs, dykes and laccoliths) and small volume lava flows, with very subordinate pyroclastic rocks, starting from the Oligocene, in the Western Alps (northern Italy), through the Late Miocene in Corsica (southern France) and in Murcia-Almeria (southeastern Spain), to the Plio- Pleistocene in Southern Tuscany and Northern Latium (central Italy), in the Balkan peninsula (Serbia and Mac- edonia) and in the Western Anatolia (Turkey). The ultrapotassic rocks are mostly lamprophyric, but olivine latitic lavas with a clear lamproitic affinity are also found, as well as dacitic to trachytic differentiated products. Lamp- roite-like rocks range from slightly silica under-saturated to silica over-saturated composition, have relatively low Al2O3, CaO and Na2O contents, resulting in plagioclase-free parageneses, and consist of abundant K-feldspar, phlogopite, diopsidic clinopyroxene and highly forsteritic olivine. Leucite is generally absent, and it is rarely found only in the groundmasses of Spanish lamproites. Mediterranean lamproites and associated rocks share an extreme enrichment in many incompatible trace elements and depletion in High Field Strength Elements and high, and positively correlated Th/La and Sm/La ratios. They have radiogenic Sr and unradiogenic Nd iso- tope compositions, high 207Pb over 206Pb and high time-integrated 232Th/238U. Their composition requires an originally depleted lithospheric mantle source metasomatized by at least two different agents: (1) a high Th/ La and Sm/La (i.e. SALATHO) component deriving from lawsonite-bearing, ancient crustal domains likely hosted in mélanges formed during the diachronous collision of the northward drifting continental slivers from Gondwana; (2) a K-rich component derived from a recent subduction and recycling of siliciclastic sediments. These metasomatic melts produced a lithospheric mantle source characterized by network of felsic and phlogo- pite-rich veins, respectively. Geothermal readjustment during post-collisional events induced progressive melt- ing of the different types of veins and the surrounding peridotite generating the entire compositional spectrum of the observed magmas. In this complex scenario, orogenic Mediterranean lamproites represent rocks that charac- terize areas that were affected by multiple Wilson cycles, as observed in the Alpine–Himalayan Realm

Subduction-related hybridization of the lithospheric mantle revealed by trace element and Sr-Nd-Pb isotopic data in composite xenoliths from Tallante (Betic Cordillera, Spain)

Ultramafic xenoliths are rarely found at convergent plate margins. A notable exception is in the Betic Cordillera of southern Spain, where the eruption of xenolith-bearing alkaline basalts during the Pliocene post-dated the Cenozoic phase of plate convergence and subduction-related magmatism. Mantle xenoliths of the monogenetic volcano of Tallante display extreme compositional heterogeneities, plausibly related to multiple tectono-magmatic episodes that affected the area. This study focuses on two peculiar composite mantle xenolith samples from Tallante, where mantle peridotite is crosscut by felsic veins of different size and mineralogy, including quartz, orthopyroxene, and plagioclase. The veins are separated from the peridotite matrix by an orthopyroxene-rich reaction zone, indicating that the causative agents were alkali-rich hydrous silica-oversaturated melts, which were likely related to recycling of subducted continental crust components. The present study reports new and detailed major and trace elements and Sr-Nd-Pb analyses of the minerals in the composite Tallante xenoliths that confirm the continental crust derivation of the metasomatic melts, and clarifies the mode in which subduction-related components are transferred to the mantle wedge in orogenic areas. The particular REE patterns of the studied minerals, as well as the variation of the isotopic ratios between the different zones of the composite xenoliths, reveal a complex metasomatic process. The distribution of the different elements, and their isotope ratios, in the studied xenoliths are controlled by the mineral phases stabilised by the interaction between the percolating melts and the peridotitic country rock. The persistence of marked isotopic heterogeneities and the lack of re-equilibration suggest that metasomatism of the sub-continental lithospheric mantle occurred shortly before the xenolith exhumation. In this scenario, the studied xenoliths and the metasomatic processes that affected them may be representative of the mantle sources of mafic potassic to ultrapotassic magmas occurring in post-collisional tectonic settings

On the possible existence of two classes of progenitors for classical novae

In a 'fiducial sample' of classical novae for which the distances are established independently of the maximum magnitude vs rate of decline relationship, novae with t2 equal to or less than 12 days are found to be concentrated at low heights above the galactic plane. At the same time, low amplitude and slow novae are found to extend all the way to z about 1000 pc. This is consistent with the statistics of extra-galactic novae. We discuss how the distribution of novae of different speed classes may indicate that the progenitors of classical novae belong to two different classes