Knowledge cartography in the sustainable environment

This paper presents the authors' contributions to an interdisciplinary scoping study into ways of understanding the mapping and interpretation of the knowledge understood and used by powerful players who make decisions that affect the urban environment. We use glass recycling as an issue that seems to be clear-cut, but that exposes extraordinarily difficult issues for decision-makers. Glass recycling is well understood from both scientific and technological perspectives, whereas the social and political aspects of glass recycling are much more complex. The public understanding of recycling in a sustainable urban environment is almost directly at odds with the scientific and technological realities. Packaging of all types, including glass, has a relatively small environmental impact yet is the most high profile of all public recycling activities. Here, we consider how to classify knowledge that is used at different levels of decision making to achieve the economic, political and environmental ends espoused by decision-makers in the urban environment. We present a matrix of subjects and institutions/players that understand and use knowledge in different ways to extend their influence far beyond their immediate spheres of activity. Our matrix covers the subject domains of Politics, Legislation, Economics, Sociology, Science and Technology. Against this axis are the institutions and power brokers that use knowledge to make decisions. These range from the individual entrepreneur, through legal bodies and secondary industries to civil services and legislatures. Over this matrix we rank and order different typologies of knowledge according to the level of decision-making. These typologies are informed by understandings that, for example, differentiate between explicit, implicit and tacit knowledge or typologies that differentiate between Mode 1 formal knowledge and Mode 2 practitioner knowledge. Considering how this knowledge can be portrayed by different approaches to knowledge mappings, both computational and non-computational, completes our pape

Sustainability and the designer: knowledge across cultures in the construction industry

In the construction industry both the design processes and the people involved in design differ significantly from the stylized models usually promoted in the academic and business press. To the complexity that is normal business in construction industry projects add the uncertainty associated with the changing legal and ethical imperatives of sustainable development and the result is a mess. Making sense of those processes that use knowledge about sustainability is daunting, particularly as companies behave very differently in different international contexts. The problem is further complicated by the collaborative nature of design and bidding for contracts. Specialization and the need to communicate with and between experts increase the cost of knowledge in a collaborative project. We propose similarities between developments in the field of sustainability and developments in the field of risk, with risk having the advantage of being further down the evolutionary line. Both fields have strong dimensions of formal rules and socio-economic behaviours. Such complexity, we argue, requires a number of perspectives to make sense of how knowledge is used in the construction industry

Message passing between individual and socially acquainted objects in Smalltalk

This paper reports additions to the commercial, object-oriented language, Smalltalk-80 and their incorporation into a knowledge based environment, POISE. These additions are suitable for the purposes of knowledge representation of engineering design. A dynamic, knowledge representation scheme is supported that allows temporary associations between objects residing in separate, static, hierarchical structures. Message passing between these associated objects is dynamic. Messages are passed, incompletely satisfied, between socially acquainted objects in order to complete a computation. We show that a computing paradigm previously achieved by a specific language, written in the Actor tradition, can also be achieved in a strictly class-instance based language which is then used to create a design knowledge representation environment. A simple, accessible example is used to illustrate the power and generality of the new language

Knowledge across Cultures in the Construction Industry: Sustainability, Innovation & Design

In the construction industry both the design and management processes differ significantly from the stylised models usually promoted in the academic and business press. To the complexity that is normal business in construction industry projects add the uncertainty associated with the changing legal and ethical imperatives of sustainable development and the result is a mess. Innovative products, together with the companies that make them, are being built on the back of a rigged market in recycled raw materials and policy changes are spawning unintended consequences. Making sense of those processes that use knowledge about sustainability, at the level of the firm, is particularly daunting because companies behave differently in different international contexts. The problem is further complicated by the collaborative nature of projects; specialization and the need to communicate with and between experts increases both costs and uncertainties. We discuss a fundamental tension between understanding knowledge creation and use, and the drive to capture processes in formal documents and systems. We propose similarities between developments in the field of sustainability and developments in the field of risk, with risk having the advantage of being further down the evolutionary line. Both fields have strong dimensions of formal rules and socio-economic behaviours. Such complexity, we argue, requires a number of perspectives to make sense of how knowledge is used in construction and allied industries

Classifying Design and Design Management in Seasonal Industries

This paper classifies design processes in seasonal industries, where designs of consumer products have to be delivered to tight deadlines, from the viewpoint of the relationship between the design company, the retailer and the final customers. The paper looks specifically at the risk that designers and retailers carry, the design rework required by the retailer and the communication between the retailer and the designer. We employ a motoring metaphor to show six models of design

Access Enhancement Objects for data management in Smalltalk

This paper reports an approach to persistence in object-oriented languages, such as Smalltalk, that require a memory-resident image for computation. The architecture uses a selective persistence that provides sufficient data-handling, with support to evolutionary data description and data consultation, for an engineering domain application without any special syntactic extension to the application language. The approach is oriented to knowledge representation and has been tested on materials data information, from several sources, that informs engineering design modelling. The architecture described is an extension of Smalltalk that uses Access Enhancement Objects, which we term Persistence Enhancers, for data management, in conjunction with a storage model optimized for domain modelling

Language fundamentals for design-support architectures

This paper illustrates a diversity of object-oriented languages which differ fundamentally in their support to evolutionary object specification and part-contents manipulation, which are features basic to the modelling of creative design. A case is presented for the modelling of properties as part-objects within a language's object-description scheme. The authors identify a genre of commonly available object-oriented languages as presenting limitations to the flexible description and manipulation of part-objects for the purpose of representing design. Our in-house knowledge-programming language, Splinter, is introduced as contributing a policy for representing concepts with highly structured properties in a way which usefully supports the description of evolving dependency information. The thesis here is that semantically rich description languages may be devised as the domain independent vehicles from which creative-design modelling architectures can be more directly developed.

Theoretical Review on Sustainable Leadership (SL)

Leadership has been identified as one of the factor contributes to construction organisation success. Therefore, leadership has acts as an admixture to the sum of leader’s effort and subordinates teamwork in order to accomplish organisational goals. There are several types of leadership style that have been practiced by leaders in the construction industry, however, there are still several morality issues such as corruptions, mismanagement and spillages occurred among leaders in the industry. Therefore, a new established leadership style such as sustainable leadership (SL) is needed to reduce any circumstances that can affect both individual and organisation in the construction industry. SL has been recognised by its holistic approaches, which include sustainability elements into it. Additionally, SL is not just depending on leader’s ability and resolution only, but to maintain the continuously efforts and achieving results are important. The aim of this paper is to explore the theoretical review of sustainable leadership (SL). A literature review on sustainable leadership (SL) is gained from journals and books of SL and leadership style in construction industry. The overall intent of this paper is to highlight the values and benefits of SL so that it can be adapted by leaders in construction organisation