Domestic Widgets: Leveraging Household Creativity in Co-Creating Data Physicalisations

The home environment is a complex design space, especially when it has multiple inhabitants. As such, the home presents challenges for the design of smart products. Householders may be different ages and have differing interests, needs, and attitudes towards technology. We pursued a research-through-design study with family households to envision and ‘co-create’ the future of data-enabled artifacts for their homes. We have iteratively developed domestic research artefacts for these households that are open, data-enabled, physical visualizations. These artefacts - called Domestic Widgets - are customisable in their design and functionality throughout their lifespan. The development process highlights design challenges for sustained co-creation and the leveraging of household creativity in (co-creation) research toolkits. These include the need to allow and inspire iterative customization, the need to accommodate changing roles within the home ecology, and the aim that such design should be inclusive for all family members (irrespective of age and technical proficiency), whilst maintaining a role and purpose in the home. We invite the RTD community to critically discuss our, and other, open and iterative end-user designs for sustained co-creation. By presenting unbuilt and interactive pre-built Domestic Widgets, we interactively foster engagement with practises of sustained co-creation

Blueprints physical to digital: curation of media to support ongoingness

Through describing ‘Blueprints’, a series of fabric collages, we detail a method for translating physical properties of objects into digital materialities of media compilations. This method has emerged within a piece of design research seeking to develop new ways to curate digital media to support ongoingness. The project context centres on working firstly with people who have a life limiting illness, secondly people living with an early stage of dementia and thirdly people who are bereaved. Ongoingness is a theoretical construct denoting an active dialogical component of ‘continued bonds’, which is an approach within bereavement care championing practices that enable a continued sense of connection between someone bereaved and a person who has died. ‘Blueprints’ are fabric collages made from scraps of fabric symbolising digital media (in this case photographs) from 2 people – one bereaved and one now deceased. The physical qualities that result from making the fabric collages (variation in layerings, thicknesses, stitching, fraying) each map onto directions for how the corresponding digital media will be composed in a compilation, and serves as a collaborative method of curating media in new ways. The ‘Blueprints’ method enables us to research if and how physical making of things can serve as a gentle way to engage with the complexities of media curation. It considers the potential value of indirect ways of curating digital media to enable ongoing connections between people through the unexpected compilations that the method creates

Production of Biodiesel from Palm Oil Oil Using Nizn /Al2o3 Catalyst As Biomass Alternative Energy

Fossil energy is a limited source of primary energy, various efforts have been made to find alternative fuels that are renewable. Vegetable oil is one of the plants that can be a source of energy, but must be converted into other forms, namely alkyl esters (biodiesel). Biodiesel is a diesel fuel substitute that can be used as a raw material for making or mixing in transportation fuels. In this study, biodiesel will be produced using an esterification-transesterification process with NiZn/Al2O3catalyst. Process variables include:temperaturesof90,120,150and180oC.theratiooffeedmethanol:palmoilata ratio of 1: 15. The concentration of NiZn/Al2o3 catalyst was varied at 1, 1.5, 2, and 2.5%. NiZn/Al2O3 catalyst was synthesized using wet impregnation method with loading of nickel and Zink at 5% wt. The catalyst will be analyzed using XRD and SEM analysis. Nickel and Zink metals in the NiZn/Al2O3catalyst catalyst have been dispersed on the surface of Al2O3. Al2O3 calcination before the impregnation process produced NiZn /Al2O3 catalyst with a crystallinity of 62,99%. The results of this study concluded that the biodiesel produced increased with increasing catalyst concentration, temperature, reaction in the esterification-transesterification process where at a temperature of 90oC and catalyst concentration 0.015 g catalyst / gr feed and reaction time of 1.5 hours obtained biodiesel yield of 35.8%, at temperature of 90oC and at a temperature of 180oC and catalyst concentration of 0.01 g catalyst/gr feed obtained biodiesel yield of 48.3%. Biodiesel was analyzed by GCMS to measure the composition of methyl esters and test the properties of biodiesel according to ASTM standards.     Keywords: Biodiesel, Palm Oil, Esterification-Transesterification, NiZn/Al2O

Participatory Action Research and Prospects for Electoral Conflict Prevention in Zambia

Although elections are fundamental to democratic consolidation by peacefully electing people to serve in public offices, in many cases they not only bring along ideological contestations but also interparty violent conflicts. Based on a Participatory Action Research (PAR) design, this paper presents field-based lessons on training conducted to curb interparty electoral conflict prior to August 2016 general elections held in Zambia. The study comprised 521 participants from nine political parties which contested in 2016 general elections. Party officials were purposely selected from their provincial, district and constituency level hierarchy. The study aimed at understanding causes for interparty political violence and identifying solutions to address the same. Findings show that major drivers of political violence in Zambia include a deep-rooted “tradition” of practicing politics of intimidation to gain political mileage, political players’ ignorance about electoral laws, weak law enforcement, and poverty (an element that drives the desire to earn a living from any opportunity). Unemployed youths are particularly vulnerable and are abused by the political elites to fan violence at a small fee. The study affirms the importance of action research as a useful bottom-up strategy for conflict prevention, especially in illiberal democracies in Africa

NICE : A Computational solution to close the gap from colour perception to colour categorization

The segmentation of visible electromagnetic radiation into chromatic categories by the human visual system has been extensively studied from a perceptual point of view, resulting in several colour appearance models. However, there is currently a void when it comes to relate these results to the physiological mechanisms that are known to shape the pre-cortical and cortical visual pathway. This work intends to begin to fill this void by proposing a new physiologically plausible model of colour categorization based on Neural Isoresponsive Colour Ellipsoids (NICE) in the cone-contrast space defined by the main directions of the visual signals entering the visual cortex. The model was adjusted to fit psychophysical measures that concentrate on the categorical boundaries and are consistent with the ellipsoidal isoresponse surfaces of visual cortical neurons. By revealing the shape of such categorical colour regions, our measures allow for a more precise and parsimonious description, connecting well-known early visual processing mechanisms to the less understood phenomenon of colour categorization. To test the feasibility of our method we applied it to exemplary images and a popular ground-truth chart obtaining labelling results that are better than those of current state-of-the-art algorithms

Empowering young adults on the autistic spectrum:Reframing assistive technology through design

Increasingly, assistive technologies are designed to ‘empower’ people with cognitive and social challenges. But what does it mean to say technology empowers? In a four-year participatory Research-through-Design project we addressed this question. Eleven autistic young adults participated in designing MyDayLight: an IoT system supporting self-management of domestic activities. Contextual inquiry, co-design, design reflection, prototype deployment and embodied interaction theory were woven together in an iterative reflective process. This allowed us to critically address certain background assumptions that typically underly common understanding of assistive technologies. We present three reframings of our evolving concept of ‘empowering technology’: 1) From ‘planned reminder’ to ‘situated attention grabber’ 2) From ‘supporting action’ to ‘scaffolding developing your own supportive environment’ 4) From ‘assistive product’, to ‘co-design tool in a larger transformational process’. Instead of supporting ‘self-sufficiency’, MyDayLight expresses a developmental-experiential interpretation of empowerment. It helps users experiment with reconfiguring their own environment, reflect on their experiences and gradually develop more grip on life. The design artifacts enabled young adults on the spectrum and their care-givers to share, question- and reframe implicitly held understandings and to imagine and explore new ways for assistive technology to play an empowering role in a person’s life-world

Optimization On Subcritical Fluid Extraction Of Zingiberene

The establishment of subcritical fluid application for zingiberene extraction was studied by employing water as a green solvent. The zingiberene content was observed by using Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrofotometry and regarding to the independent variable of temperature, extraction time, ginger-solvent ratio and aging time. By applying subcritical water, the critical value of zingiberene content obtained was 0.036%.  This value was approached by the surface modeling of alpha for rotatability design which performed at 125 C, 20 min of extraction time, 0.08 of ginger to solvent ratio and 9 min of aging time of extraction parameters. The surface modeling was validated by plotting the observed and predicted value of zingiberene content and evidenced by the value of R-square at 0.76

Design with neotribes

The neotribe is a sociological concept which postulates the return of tribes in a contemporary form. French sociologist Michel Maffesoli sees them as an emotional community, sometimes ephemeral, changeable in composition and which often lacks organisation and routinisation, in contrast to the original form of a tribe. This paper reflects on three interactive design projects made to test this theory, undertaken in 2017 and 2018. The projects were developed around three tribes: the People’s Fridge, the Freegans in Brixton (London) and the Tuskers on the EVE Online game. These groups are of interest because of their strong purpose and shared values. The notion of emergence is of particular interest in their development as it unites ethnographic and design approaches. This paper explores the research (divergence) and the making process (convergence). The research engages with theory and object analysis as catalysers. Finally, the process allows us to explore concepts such as DIY citizenship, the gift economy, values in an online game community and critique the notion of ‘smart’ in the Internet of Things. Hence, we hope this methodology allows more designers to contribute to a subject that goes beyond practice

Surviving in hot and cold: psychrophiles and thermophiles from Deception Island volcano, Antarctica

Polar volcanoes harbor unique conditions of extreme temperature gradients capable of selecting different types of extremophiles. Deception Island is a marine stratovolcano located at Maritime Antarctica that is notable for its pronounced temperature gradients over very short distances, reaching values up to 100 °C in the fumaroles, and subzero temperatures next to the glaciers. Due to these characteristics, Deception can be considered an interesting analogue of extraterrestrial environments. Our main goal in this study was to isolate thermophilic and psychrophilic bacteria from sediments associated with fumaroles and glaciers from two geothermal sites in Deception Island, comprising temperatures between 0 and 98 °C, and to evaluate their survivability to desiccation and UV-C radiation. Our results revealed that culturable thermophiles and psychrophiles were recovered among the extreme temperature gradient in Deception volcano, which indicates that these extremophiles remain alive even when the conditions do not comprise their growth range. The viability of culturable psychrophiles in hyperthermophilic environments is still poorly understood and our work showed the importance of future studies about their survival strategies in high temperatures. Finally, the spore-forming thermophilic isolates which we found have displayed good survival to desiccation and UV-C irradiation, which suggests their potential to be further explored in astrobiological studies