Barriers, Motivations, and Preferences for Physical Activity Among Female African American Older Adults

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 11% of adults more than the age of 65 meet the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. Among minority populations, only 5% of non-Hispanic Black older adults met the guidelines. Given our limited understanding of psychosocial and environmental factors that affect physical activity participation in these groups, the purpose of our focus groups was to investigate barriers, motivators, and preferences of physical activity for community-dwelling African American older adults. Three focus groups were conducted with female African American older adults (N = 20). Questions posed to each focus group targeted motivations and barriers toward physical activity as well as their preferences for physical activity. The motivations included perceived health benefits of physical activity, social support, and enjoyment associated with engagement in physical activity. Prominent barriers included time and physical limitations, peer pressure and family responsibilities, and weather and poor neighborhood conditions. Group activities involving a dance component and novel exercises such as tai-chi or yoga were preferred choices. These findings should be taken into consideration when designing and implementing research or community physical activity programs for female African American older adults

Design Microprotests

This essay considers three design projects as microprotests. Reflecting on the ways design practice can generate spaces, sites and methods of protest, we use the concept of microprotest to consider how we, as designers ourselves, can protest by scaling down, focussing, slowing down and paying attention to the edges of our practice. Design microprotest is a form of design activism that is always collaborative, takes place within a community, and involves careful translation of a political conversation. While microprotest can manifest in any design discipline, in this essay we focus on visual communication design. In particular we consider the deep, reflexive practice of listening as the foundation of microprotests in visual communication design. While small in scale and fleeting in duration, these projects express rich and deep political engagements through conversations that create and maintain safe spaces. While many design theorists (Julier; Fuad-Luke; Clarke; Irwin et al.) have done important work to contextualise activist design as a broad movement with overlapping branches (social design, community design, eco-design, participatory design, critical design, and transition design etc.), the scope of our study takes ‘micro’ as a starting point. We focus on the kind of activism that takes shape in moments of careful design; these are moments when designers move politically, rather than necessarily within political movements. These microprotests respond to community needs through design more than they articulate a broad activist design movement. As such, the impacts of these microprotests often go unnoticed outside of the communities within which they take place. We propose, and test in this essay, a mode of analysis for design microprotests that takes design activism as a starting point but pays more attention to community and translation than designers and their global reach. In his analysis of design activism, Julier proposes “four possible conceptual tactics for the activist designer that are also to be found in particular qualities in the mainstream design culture and economy” (Julier, Introduction 149). We use two of these tactics to begin exploring a selection of attributes common to design microprotests: temporality – which describes the way that speed, slowness, progress and incompletion are dealt with; and territorialisation – which describes the scale at which responsibility and impact is conceived (227). In each of three projects to which we apply these tactics, one of us had a role as a visual communicator. As such, the research is framed by the knowledge creating paradigm described by Jonas as “research through design”. We also draw on other conceptualisations of design activism, and the rich design literature that has emerged in recent times to challenge the colonial legacies of design studies (Schultz; Tristan et al.; Escobar). Some analyses of design activism already focus on the micro or the minor. For example, in their design of social change within organisations as an experimental and iterative process, Lensjkold, Olander and Hasse refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian: “minor design activism is ‘a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation” (67). Like minor activism, design microprotests are linked to the continuous mobilisation of actors and networks in processes of collective experimentation. However microprotests do not necessarily focus on organisational change. Rather, they create new (and often tiny) spaces of protest within which new voices can be heard and different kinds of listening can be done. In the first of our three cases, we discuss a representation of transdisciplinary listening. This piece of visual communication is a design microprotest in itself. This section helps to frame what we mean by a safe space by paying attention to the listening mode of communication. In the next sections we explore temporality and territorialisation through the design microprotests Just Spaces which documents the collective imagining of safe places for LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer) women and non-binary identities through a series of graphic objects and Conversation Piece, a book written, designed and published over three days as a proposition for a collective future

...sphere of possibility...

Inside Out, curated by Claire Smith, is an international touring exhibition that focuses on emerging digital design techniques and the growth of sophisticated rapid prototyping tools and methods. It features forty-six miniature sculptures produced in resin using 3D printing technologies by emerging and established artists and designers produced through an exchange programme between art and design schools in the UK and Australia. Developments in virtual computer visualisation and integrated digital technologies are giving contemporary makers new insight and opportunities to create objects and forms which were previously impossible to produce or difficult to envisage. The intention of the exhibition is to explore future rapid prototyping technologies currently being investigated via practice as research paradigm. Collaborators included the Art Technology Coalition, the University of Technology, Sydney and RMIT University in Australia along with De Montfort University, Manchester Metropolitan University and University College Falmouth incorporating Dartington College of Arts in the United Kingdom. ...sphere of possibility... explores the connections and disjunctions between the digital and analogue, the hand and the mechanical and the translation between 2-D and 3-D forms. This work questions the relationship between the scientific and the sacred and demonstrates the possibility of a drawing on paper being applied to a 3-D process. As an outcome of an experimental process, it provides a new element in Gotheâs larger research project, Drawing Country 2009-2011, that advocates an examination of the ways to enhance connectedness and connection to place through visual communication

Firesticks - International Institute for Information Design

The IIID Awards recognize the benefit of information design and showcases the variety of ways that information design impacts our lives. The IIID Awards are an excellent way to heighten the visibility of the work of information designers and promote the value of their work in research and in addressing vital – and often critical – human needs worldwide. Prof. Judith Moldenhauer, Wayne State University, US

Drawing Water II

Memory Flows, a project of the Centre for Media Arts and Innovation, UTS, culminated in an exhibition entitled 'Memory Flows: rivers, creeks and the great artesian basin' which examined the concepts of 'water, flows and memory'. Curated by Sophia Kouyoumdjian, Norie Neumark and Deb Turnbull, it featured fifteen media artworks by twenty CMAI members and affiliated artists: Ian Andrews, Chris Bowman, Chris Caines, Damian Castaldi, Sherre DeLys, Clement Girault, Jacqueline Gothe, Ian Gwilt, Nigel Helyer, Megan Heyward, Neil Jenkins, Solange Kershaw, Roger Mills, Maria Miranda, Norie Neumark, Shannon O'Neill, Greg Shapley, Victor Steffensen, Jen Teo and Jes Tyrrell. The exhibition, open for 15 days over two months with a public forum on June 20, included video and audio installations, interactive media works, mobile devices, projections on surfaces and through water, and an array of river related artworks and artefacts. Audience numbers totalled 2,700 visitors. 'Drawing Water II' is a collaborative work by Ian Gwilt and me. Using drawings of Sydney Harbour waterways, an animated projection with an accompanying sound design was developed that allowed the viewer an immersive experience of walking country and provided an understanding of the landforms and waterways that make up the Sydney Harbour from the Pacific Ocean to the Blue Mountains. This project is part of an ongoing research project, 'Drawing Country, that advocates an examination of ways to enhance connectedness and connection to place through visual communication. Memory Flows 2009-2010, a distributed media art project of the CMAI, was funded by the Inter-Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts

Collecting Places

Memory Flows, a project of the Centre for Media Arts and Innovation, UTS, culminated in an exhibition entitled 'Memory Flows: rivers, creeks and the great artesian basin' which examined the concepts of 'water, flows and memory'. Curated by Sophia Kouyoumdjian, Norie Neumark and Deb Turnbull, it featured fifteen media artworks by twenty CMAI members and affiliated artists: Ian Andrews, Chris Bowman, Chris Caines, Damian Castaldi, Sherre DeLys, Clement Girault, Jacqueline Gothe, Ian Gwilt, Nigel Helyer, Megan Heyward, Neil Jenkins, Solange Kershaw, Roger Mills, Maria Miranda, Norie Neumark, Shannon O'Neill, Greg Shapley, Victor Steffensen, Jen Teo and Jes Tyrrell. The exhibition, open for 15 days over two months with a public forum on June 20, included video and audio installations, interactive media works, mobile devices, projections on surfaces and through water, and an array of river related artworks and artefacts. Audience numbers totalled 2,700 visitors. 'Collecting Places' is the outcome of a collaboration between Jacqueline Gothe and Shere Delys from ABC Radio and Executive Producer of POOL, http://pool.abc.net.au/. The installation is a chalk drawing on a brick wall with a sound scape. The image resulted from Gothe drawing in the studio as DeLys meditated at the Coorong in South Australia, the place where the Murray River meets the ocean. The outcome of the collaborative process contributes to Gothe's participatory practice, Drawing Country, an ongoing research project that advocates an examination of the ways to enhance connectedness and connection to place through visual communication. Memory Flows 2009-2010, a distributed media art project of the CMAI, was funded by the Inter-Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts

P-cymenesulphonyl chloride : A bio-based activating group and protecting group for greener organic synthesis

A bio-derived protecting/activating group has been synthesized by introducing a sulphonyl chloride group to the aromatic ring of p-cymene derived from citrus peel waste. The resulting p-cymenesulphonyl chloride was evaluated as an activating group by reacting with 1-octanol, 2-octanol, phenol and piperidine, and further reactions of the activated alcohols. The comparison to tosyl chloride demonstrates that the bio-based alternative can be effectively utilized as a direct replacement for the current fossil derived equivalent