Seeking Resonances for Remote Communal Chanting Practices

We take a Research Through Design (RtD) approach to explore Buddhist communal chanting practices, seeking to develop tangible design research products that support meaningful techno-spiritual remote connections. This work is informed by an autoethnography in a Buddhist community in the UK. We focus on the experiential and multi-sensory aspects of these practices, presenting three experiments that expose the sound environment as a design material for our future work. In doing so, our attention is drawn to the resonances we encounter in the chanted vocalisations, the interplay with sonic ritual equipment, and the soundscapes of the rooms in which they are practiced

‘Chugging along, plugging in and out of it’: Understanding a place-based approach for community-based support of mental health recovery

Community-based Mental Health (MH) organisations in the United Kingdom (UK) are facing challenges for sustaining in-person service delivery. Without empirical evidence that demonstrates the value of a place-based approach for MH recovery, and the types of resources needed to build nurturing spaces for peer support, community-based MH organisations will struggle to maintain their physical spaces. We present empirical insights from a case study involving interviews with 20 students accessing peer support services at the Recovery College Collective, a community-based MH organisation located in the North East of England. The interview study aims to evidence how a place-based approach can afford MH recovery. We draw from discourses on place-making and interpret our interview findings through an established framework that highlights four mechanisms through which place impacts recovery: place for doing, being, becoming and belonging. We use this framework to structure our findings and highlight key qualities of place for establishing and maintaining MH recovery. Our contribution is two-fold: we address a gap in the literature by providing empirical understandings of how place influences MH recovery, whilst extending previous research by considering the role that place plays in community-based organisations. This is timely because of the challenges faced in securing in-person service delivery post-pandemic, and a shift towards remote service provision models. We highlight key implications: (i) Accessing a physical place dedicated to MH support is vital for people who do not have anywhere else to go and are socially isolated due to their health conditions; (ii) Connecting through peer-to-peer interaction is an integral part of the recovery process, and learning from people with lived experience can inform a place-based approach that best suit their needs; and (iii) Recognising the value of place for MH support, and the resources needed for peer support delivery in the community, will help secure places that our research participants described as lifesaving

People with long-term conditions sharing personal health data via digital health technologies:a scoping review to inform design

The use of digital technology amongst people living with a range of long-term health conditions to support self-management has increased dramatically. More recently, digital health technologies to share and exchange personal health data with others have been investigated. Sharing personal health data with others is not without its risks: sharing data creates threats to the privacy and security of personal data and plays a role in trust, adoption and continued use of digital health technology. Our work aims to inform the design of these digital health technologies by investigating the reported intentions of sharing health data with others, the associated user experiences when using these digital health technologies and the trust, identity, privacy and security (TIPS) considerations for designing digital health technologies that support the trusted sharing of personal health data to support the self-management of long-term health conditions. To address these aims, we conducted a scoping review, analysing over 12,000 papers in the area of digital health technologies. We conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of 17 papers that described digital health technologies that support sharing of personal health data, and extracted design implications that could enhance the future development of trusted, private and secure digital health technologies.</p

Crafting Critical Heritage Discourses into Interactive Exhibition Design

This paper argues how a more reflective design practice that embraces critical discourses can transform interactive exhibition design and therefore the museum visiting experience. Four framing arguments underpin our exhibition design making: the value of materiality, visiting as an aesthetic experience, challenging the authorized voice, and heritage as a process. These arguments were embodied through design, art and craft practice into one interactive exhibition at a house museum. We draw from our design process discussing the implications that adopting an approach informed by critical heritage debates has on exhibition design and suggest three sensitizing concepts (polyvocal narratives, dialogical interaction, interweaving time and space) bridging the practice of interactive exhibition design and critical heritage theory

Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Yeast Mitochondrial Biogenesis: Transcriptional and Post-Transcriptional mRNA Oscillatory Modules

Examples of metabolic rhythms have recently emerged from studies of budding yeast. High density microarray analyses have produced a remarkably detailed picture of cycling gene expression that could be clustered according to metabolic functions. We developed a model-based approach for the decomposition of expression to analyze these data and to identify functional modules which, expressed sequentially and periodically, contribute to the complex and intricate mitochondrial architecture. This approach revealed that mitochondrial spatio-temporal modules are expressed during periodic spikes and specific cellular localizations, which cover the entire oscillatory period. For instance, assembly factors (32 genes) and translation regulators (47 genes) are expressed earlier than the components of the amino-acid synthesis pathways (31 genes). In addition, we could correlate the expression modules identified with particular post-transcriptional properties. Thus, mRNAs of modules expressed “early” are mostly translated in the vicinity of mitochondria under the control of the Puf3p mRNA-binding protein. This last spatio-temporal module concerns mostly mRNAs coding for basic elements of mitochondrial construction: assembly and regulatory factors. Prediction that unknown genes from this module code for important elements of mitochondrial biogenesis is supported by experimental evidence. More generally, these observations underscore the importance of post-transcriptional processes in mitochondrial biogenesis, highlighting close connections between nuclear transcription and cytoplasmic site-specific translation