Cultural measurement on whose terms? Critical friends as an experiment in participant-led evaluation

Critical Friends is an enquiry into the commissioning, planning and delivery of participatory art carried out by the people that such projects claim to empower. Participants become interviewers, researchers and evaluators, acting as ‘productive parasites’ to a process of socially-engaged art. Aims of social cohesion and active citizenship underpinned a series of publicly-funded art commissions in North Greenwich, London (2008-2011). The group of Critical Friends were residents of North Greenwich who came together to investigate what, why and how these socially engaged art projects were happening in their area. Did the projects reflect the ambitious aims to ‘stimulate debate to generate action and change’ and ‘develop connections and relations between people’? Facilitated by myself and Rebecca Maguire over three years, Critical Friends developed their own questions and methods for finding out. While participation and engagement is usually measured for such projects in terms of numbers of people who attend workshops, Critical Friends was a space for enacting a different kind of cultural measurement. The group focused on trying to find out the qualitative experiences of other participants and interrogated the underlying motives, targets and politics behind the commissions. They did this by acting as participant observers in the projects themselves and by interviewing artists, commissioners, board members, their neighbours and friends (http://criticalfriends.sophiehope.org.uk/)

A highly efficient 3D level-set grain growth algorithm tailored for ccNUMA architecture

International audienceA highly efficient simulation model for 2D and 3D grain growth was developed based on the level-set method. The model introduces modern computational concepts to achieve excellent performance on parallel computer architectures. Strong scalability was measured on cache-coherent non-uniform memory access (ccNUMA) architectures. To achieve this, the proposed approach considers the application of local level-set functions at the grain level. Ideal and non-ideal grain growth was simulated in 3D with the objective to study the evolution of statistical representative volume elements in polycrystals. In addition, microstructure evolution in an anisotropic magnetic material affected by an external magnetic field was simulated

Partitioning Vulnerabilities : On the Paradoxes of Participatory Design in the City of Malmö

In this chapter, Björgvinsson and Keshavarz challenge the claims of Scandinavian participatory design in initiating bottom-up change, democratic engagement and overcoming the vulnerabilities of marginal groups. By following its trajectory from its engagement with trade unions in the 1970s to local communities in the 2000s and beyond, the chapter problematizes participatory design’s presuppositions in relation to vulnerabilities associated with different groups. Through analysing a participatory design project where Björgvinsson was involved, the authors show how the call to and the process of participation always happen in an already partitioned world. As such, they argue participation does not necessarily give equal voices to participating parts, as frequently claimed but, rather, produce new parts, ignore certain other parts and lift up particular parts depending on the power relations involved. The chapter concludes that participatory methods not only generate less recognized vulnerabilities, but also ignore the resistance made by vulnerable groups against uneven participation