Danger from the Outside:Resident Perceptions of Environmental Contamination at Home

Research examining human experiences of environmental contamination highlights the significance of place in influencing responses. However, a dearth of information exists on how indoor contamination affects experiences of living with legacies of land and groundwater pollution. This paper addresses this shortfall by drawing on evidence derived from an online survey, 10 semi-structured interviews, and a focus group to examine factors associated with lifescape change in home environments. The findings suggest that perceptions of the visibility and transferability of contaminants, and whether such contaminants are located in either indoor or outdoor domestic spaces, influence residents’ experiences, in turn. Through its focus on interactions between people and pollution, this article makes an original contribution to research on the spatial dynamics of individuals’ experiences with contamination. In concluding, this paper highlights the need for public health communication to provide clear guidance aimed at reducing feelings of uncertainty within domestic spheres

Urine Treatment on the International Space Station: Current Practice and Novel Approaches

A reliable, robust, and resilient water recovery system is of paramount importance on board the International Space Station (ISS). Such a system must be able to treat all sources of water, thereby reducing resupply costs and allowing for longer-term space missions. As such, technologies able to dewater urine in microgravity have been investigated by different space agencies. However, despite over 50 years of research and advancements on water extraction from human urine, the Urine Processing Assembly (UPA) and the Water Processor Assembly (WPA) now operating on the ISS still achieve suboptimal water recovery rates and require periodic consumables resupply. Additionally, urine brine from the treatment is collected for disposal and not yet reused. These factors, combined with the need for a life support system capable of tolerating even dormant periods of up to one year, make the research in this field ever more critical. As such, in the last decade, extensive research was conducted on the adaptation of existing or emerging technologies for the ISS context. In virtue of having a strong chemical resistance, small footprint, tuneable selectivity and versatility, novel membrane-based processes have been in focus for treating human urine. Their hybridisation with thermal and biological processes as well as the combination with new nanomaterials have been particularly investigated. This article critically reviews the UPA and WPA processes currently in operation on the ISS, summarising the research directions and needs, highlighted by major space agencies, necessary for allowing life support for missions outside the Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Additionally, it reviews the technologies recently proposed to improve the performance of the system as well as new concepts to allow for the valorisation of the nutrients in urine or the brine after urine dewatering

Taking Pause: The Role of Art and Literature in Reimagining Human-Nonhuman Relations and Transdisciplinary Collaboration

The academy’s separation of the arts from the sciences constricts researchers’ opportunities to engage with works of art and literature that pause our time-worn processes of data collection and analysis. From the works of Humboldt and Goethe, to more recent writers and artists, literature and art offer us moments to stop and think differently about the ways in which we interact with our environment and others, human and nonhuman. In moments of enchantment, awe or stillness, we might lose ourselves, and imagine other less anthropocentric ways of being in the world and new transdisciplinary forms of collaboration

Local adaptations in a changing water climate : small-scale infrastructures

Editorial outlining the theme of the special issue. The theme of “Local adaptations in a changing water climate: small-scale infrastructures” aims to encompass diverse studies of how people think, feel and act about small-scale and/or novel systems of water provision and sanitation. In contrast to most studies of the introduction of small-scale water systems, these papers have first-world settings. The emphasis is on rainwater tanks (RWTs) in urban or suburban contexts (Sofoulis, Garcia et al, Walton and Gardner), although thematic examples include a combination of small-scale (or “micro”) infrastructures in an off-grid community (Woelfle-Erskine). These small-scale infrastructures present challenges to users, water managers, and social water researchers due to their novelty as “not-Big Water” systems (Sofoulis). Whereas people’s interactions with conventional infrastructures can largely be understood tacitly through shared familiarity with the system’s parameters and usage conventions, novelties can stimulate systems change, prompt emergent behaviours, and throw open previously settled questions about what counts as an appropriate technology or constitutes an acceptable practice. Moreover, because novel small-scale infrastructures such as RWTs actively involve their user-operators at home (or workplace), they put the focus on everyday practices as a site of water resource governance. This everyday, small-scale and site-specific character poses quandaries for policy-makers and technocrats used to centralised management of large-scale infrastructures: how can, or how should, local and autonomously operated facilities be regulated? (Some options are canvassed by Walton and Gardner in this issue.

Initiating a Transdisciplinary Conversation to Improve Indoor Ecologies

Indoor spaces have not traditionally been considered the domain of human ecology. They have been the subject of cultural, architectural, and sociological inquiry, and more recently the site at which various pathogenic or toxic encounters may be studied; yet, these concerns have rarely been investigated as part of one unified and codependent ecology. This special issue aims to remedy this dislocation by beginning a conversation between a range of disciplinary perspectives concerned with the indoors. This ambition is not only linked to a desire to articulate and connect multiple interacting variables operative in indoor spaces, but also to address both a number of factors that are increasingly creating indoor environmental conditions that are suboptimal for human habitation, and the broader more-thanhuman ecosystems in which they are situated. Although certainly not exhaustive in scope, the research presented in this special issue provides an exemplary profile of situated knowledge that must form the basis of future, integrative, transdisciplinary research into indoor ecologies. Spanning design, architecture, social and human ecology, environmental psychology, sociology, mycology, biotechnology, spatial sciences, statistics, engineering, philosophy, and “lay” and experiential knowledge perspectives, this special issue uncovers a number of the challenges and fertile points of overlap across epistemological approaches and areas of concern within the indoors. The goal of this issue is to highlight the points of divergence, and, more crucially, the points of convergence from which a new transdisciplinary approach to indoor research can emerge

Transitions, social practices and design : notes from a transdisciplinary research project

There is currently great interest in the idea of transitions to help bring on more sustainable societies and cultures. This is demonstrated by community led projects like Transition Towns, and government sponsored reports such as the German Advisory Council on Global Change’s World in Transition: a social contract for sustainability (2011). Design has an important role to play in envisioning, redirecting and steering transitions, and is uniquely implicated in how transitions play out. Design’s involvement in transitions is also changing how design is being taught and practised. This paper describes the role of design research in an ambitious transdisciplinary research project, ‘Transitioning to sustainable sanitation futures’, that involved trialing a novel system of sanitation in a university setting. In the context of century-old sanitation infrastructure, institutional sectors speaking at cross-purposes, embedded conventions of comfort, cleanliness and convenience in toileting and limited understanding of how specific technologies are scripting social practices, there was much to learn. The paper will detail design’s involvement in the project across three action research phases. Two cohorts of visual communications design students from two universities responded to a range of briefs generated by the project team. Students designed narratives to introduce the complex scenarios presented by the project; in situ signage to aid use of the new technologies; and social engagement tools to elicit feedback and responses from end-users. The resulting artefacts influenced how the project was perceived and supported a shift in emphasis from technical to social innovation. The paper will consider implications for design research in a university setting, where niche experimentation for a broad range of stakeholders could support socio-technical transitions in the wider culture. Drawing on current transitions literature, this paper advocates for the idea of the university-based design researcher as an ‘anticipatory change agent’ (WBGU 2011) within such research enterprises

Designing for system change : innovation, practice and everyday water

In this paper we examine the installation and trial of a novel system of integrated water management from the perspective of household users in order to reveal the importance of considering social practices in the adoption of innovative water management systems, and in the process reframe the ways in which the implementation of water conserving technologies is understood. Drawing on a case study in peri-urban Victoria, Australia, this paper analyses the experiences of 25 household residents over an 18-month period to determine how household users adapted their everyday water use (or not) to a new water management system. This research focuses on three important domains of practice in water management – toileting, cleaning and communication – to reveal the tension between established and novel practices. Our findings demonstrate that the conventional focus on technocratic and engineering-oriented components of system innovation by the water sector may actually impede the successful implementation and use of innovative, potentially more sustainable, water and sanitation systems. This paper suggests what is needed is an approach to system innovation that takes daily discourses, community knowledge, practices and the localised contexts of water users as critical in influencing the successful uptake of small-scale innovative water systems

Scaling Down: Researching Household Water Practices

The thematic title of this special themed section of ACME � �Scaling Down: Researching household water practices� � is a corrective to the excessive emphasis on �scaling up� frequently encountered in discourses on water management. Scaling up is a concept essentially derived from engineering procedure whereby small-scale models of designs are trialled before full-size working models are built. In positivist social science, the idea of scaling up seems now to have been accepted without much debate; researchers empirically study phenomena within a given context to develop theories that are then extrapolated. When technocrats think about and deal with water, they seem to accept scaling up as the only valid approach. When technocrats advise bureaucrats on water management, they tend to define this approach as the most rational, technically sound and economically efficient approach. Technological fixes are perceived to bypass entanglement with the messy and value-laden domains of society and politics. A technocratic approach treats social change as an engineering problem, where individuals within the society are provided expert opinions aimed at changing their attitudes to produce a more economically rationalist and efficient set of water consumption behaviours

Transdisciplinary research and practice for sustainability outcomes

Transdisciplinary Research and Practice for Sustainability Outcomes examines the role of transdisciplinarity in the transformations needed for a sustainable world. After an historical overview of transdisciplinarity, Part 1 focuses on tools and frameworks to achieve sustainability outcomes in practice and Part 2 consolidates work by a number of scholars on supporting transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners.Part 3 is a series of case studies including several international examples that demonstrate the challenges and rewards of transdisciplinary work. The concluding chapter proposes a future research pathway for understanding the human factors that underpin successful transdisciplinary research

Scaling down : researching household water practices

The thematic title of this special themed section of ACME — “Scaling Down: Researching household water practices” — is a corrective to the excessive emphasis on “scaling up” frequently encountered in discourses on water management. Scaling up is a concept essentially derived from engineering procedure whereby small-scale models of designs are trialled before full-size working models are built. In positivist social science, the idea of scaling up seems now to have been accepted without much debate; researchers empirically study phenomena within a given context to develop theories that are then extrapolated. When technocrats think about and deal with water, they seem to accept scaling up as the only valid approach. When technocrats advise bureaucrats on water management, they tend to define this approach as the most rational, technically sound and economically efficient approach. Technological fixes are perceived to bypass entanglement with the messy and value-laden domains of society and politics. A technocratic approach treats social change as an engineering problem, where individuals within the society are provided expert opinions aimed at changing their attitudes to produce a more economically rationalist and efficient set of water consumption behaviours