Designing a notation for the senses

Understanding the role of the non-visual senses is difficult, as there is at present no recording medium for the olfactory, gustatory, tactile or even aural environment which is useful to the practice of urban design. In any case, recording has a different aim from drawing and notation

The scale of sense : spatial extent and multimodal urban design

This paper is derived from the work of the UK AHRC/EPSRC 'Designing for the 21st Century' research project Multimodal Representation of Urban Space. This research group seeks to establish a new form of notation for urban design which pays attention to our entire sensory experience of place. This paper addresses one of the most important aspects of this endeavour: scale. Scale is of course a familiar abstraction to all architects and urban designers, allowing for representations tailored to different levels of detail and allowing drawings to be translated into build structures. Scale is also a factor in human experience: the spatial extent of each of our senses is different. Many forms of architectonic representation are founded upon the extension of the visual modality, and designs are accordingly tuned towards this sense. We can all speak from our own experience, however, that urban environments are a feast for all the senses. The visceral quality of walking down a wide tree-lined boulevard differs greatly from the subterranean crowds of the subway, or the meandering pause invited by the city square. Similarly, our experience of hearing and listening is more than just a passive observation by virtue of our own power of voice and the feedback created by our percussive movements across a surface or through a medium. Taste and smell are also excited by the urban environment, the social importance of food preparation and the associations between smell and public health are issues of sensory experience. The tactile experience of space, felt with the entire body as well as our more sensitive hands, allowing for direct manipulation and interactions as well as sensations of mass, heat, proximity and texture. Our project team shall present a series of tools for designers which explore the variety of sensory modalities and their associated scales. This suite of notations and analytical frameworks turn our attention to the sensory experience of places, and offers a method and pattern book for more holistic multi-sensory and multi-modal urban design

Making sense of the city : representing the multi-modality of urban space

This project emerged from a previous multidisciplinary Designing for the 21st Century project - Design Imaging. The original project explored ways in which the full range of our senses would be exploited to assist with the design process. Discussions on multisensory and multimodal design led to a number of avenues being identified for further research. One in particular, that of representing urban space in multisensory manner was the subject of a successful second-round grant application from the Departments of Architecture and Design, Manufacture, and Engineering Management at the University of Strathclyde. The urban environment is experienced through each of our senses. Despite this, urban design practices and urban representation have focused their attention on the visual. This project posits the thesis that a fuller urban environment can be designed by attending multiple sensory modalities, by giving equal weight to the aural, the tactile, the olfactory, the gustatory, the haptic, the kinetic and the thermal

Getting Lost in Tokyo

This paper explores the potential for using alternative forms of inscriptive practice to describe the urban space of the Tokyo Subway. I begin with an account of the process of getting lost in Shinjuku Subway Station in the heart of Tokyo. This station represents a limit condition of place, being dense and complex beyond the powers of traditional architectural representation. The station is explored through serial translations, beginning with narrative, moving to a flowchart diagram, Laban dance notation, recurring motifs and archetypes, architectural drawing, photography, and cartography. As Claudia Brodsky Lacour and Tim Ingold describe, the form our inscriptive practices take are crucial to the ways in which we conceptualise those places. How much of the experience of a place is lost in the traditional inscriptive practices of the architect? This description of the urban space of the Tokyo subway forms the basis for an extended study exploring the description of this experience of place, and the power of such description to theorise space. The ultimate aim of this is to shift the focus of urban design away from geometric principles and towards the experiences that might be enjoyed in such places

Inscriptive Practice as Gesture

The book coincides with an international conference of the same name, taking place at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, in November 2016

Coherent beam superposition of ten diode lasers with a Dammann grating

We demonstrate the use of a binary diffractive optical element in a very simple setup to convert the multilobed beam from a low fill factor array of coherent laser diodes into a quasi-Gaussian beam. The phase profile of the grating is determined with a phase retrieval algorithm. Experimentally, the conversion efficiency reaches more than 44%. We also establish that this setup can be used to make an effective measurement of the coherency of the laser array

Asynchronous web-based learning, a practical method to enhance teaching in emergency medicine

Objective: To compare medical knowledge acquisition among emergency medicine (EM) residents who attend weekly core content lectures with those absent but asynchronously viewing the same lectures in a Web-based electronic platform. Subjects and Methods: During the study period all EM residents attending or absent from weekly educational conferences were given a quiz on the covered material. During Phase 1, absentees were not given supplemental educational content for missed lectures. During Phase 2, absentees were sent a link to an online multimedia module containing an audiovisual recording of the actual missed lecture with presentation slides. Scores between attendees and absentees during both phases were compared using a repeated-measures analysis to evaluate the effect of the supplemental online module on knowledge acquisition. Results:Thirty-nine EM residents (equally distributed in postgraduate years 1–4) were studied during a 15-week period. Overall and after adjusting for sex and postgraduate year level, both lecture attendance (b=27; 95% confidence interval, 22–32;p Conclusions: In an EM residency program, asynchronous Web-based learning may result in medical knowledge acquisition similar to or better than attending traditional core content lectures. The percentage of curriculum delivery by asynchronous learning that may be used to achieve overall terminal learning objectives in medical knowledge acquisition requires further study

SYSTEM RESPONSE TIME, OPERATOR PRODUCTIVITY AND JOB SATISFACTION

This study examines the impact of on-line system response time on CRT operator productivity and job satisfaction. It was predicted that increase in response time would affect total transaction volume and total errors adversely, that is, total transaction volume would decrease with longer response times and total errors would increase. Total productive transactions, the difference between total transactions and total errors, was expected to decrease as response time increased. Operator job satisfaction was also expected to decrease. The study confirmed the prediction with regard to total transactions and productive transactions: both decreased as response time increased. Total errors actually decreased as response time increased, up to times of 12 seconds. When response time exceeded 12 seconds, errors increased. The impact of response time on productivity suggests nearly all transactions should be completed in 12 seconds or less. Beyond this level, the organization in the study suffered severe penalties in lost productivity. A relationship was also found between increased response times and reduced job satisfaction.Information Systems Working Papers Serie