Psychophysiological measures of stress in caregivers of individuals with autism spectrum disorder: a systematic review

Purpose: Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often self-report heightened levels of stress and physical health problems. This paper reviewed studies assessing physiological measures of stress among parents of children with ASD. Methods: Systematic database searches identified 15 studies meeting inclusion criteria. Studies were reviewed to determine: (a) control group characteristics; (b) caregiver and care recipient characteristics; (c) setting; (d) physiological measures employed; (e) physiological outcomes; and (f) stressor type. A measure of methodological quality was also applied. Results: Salivary cortisol was the most common physiological measure employed. A pattern of blunted physiological activity emerged within the reviewed studies, though some studies reported normal or even higher physiological activity among this population. Conclusions: Findings suggested dysfunction of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis and autonomic nervous system for some, but not all, parents of children with ASD. Further research is warranted

Distance Collaboration. a Comparative Analysis of Tools and Procedures

Besides design theory and practice, curricula of architectural students should include some experiences referring to professional situations. Among these experiences, Collaborative Design is nowadays somewhat frequent. It is normally practised by large professional studios, using expansive software which is beyond what they can afford on average. Much academic research on the topic has also been carried out often resulting in the proposition of new and too complex description models of the building object. We think that students should instead get acquainted with such a design process: an experience has been planned and carried out in our Department for the purpose of practising the possible paradigm in a more ordinary context. Its purpose was threefold. First, making the students grasp the methodis potentialities and learn the right approach. Second, testing the practical suitability of the most widely used software. Third, comparing their relative efficiency. The software we used was: Architectural Desktop, AutoCad Revit, ArchiCad for Teamwork. We focused special attention on how representing and managing restraints, since they are the main source of conflicts. This was the hardest topic to manage. The results were partly positive inasmuch as the experience showed that it could be possible to adopt the Collaborative Design paradigm which is also used in the AEC field. The drawbacks emerged from the analysis of non-dedicated software are: a relative slow process for the lack of certain specific tools, a subsequent necessity of integrating them with different communication software, the difficulty of managing hard and soft restraints. However, in the final analysis, the experience can be considered as positive

Performative Architecture: New Semantic for New Shapes?

Two innovations have more deeply changed the building process: the operational continuity of the design and construction phases and the software allowing not only the representation but also the autonomous creation of complex shapes never before thought, just because they could not be represented. This last innovation introduce to a “Performative Architecture” that addresses to emerge a new kind of architecture. Building performances (structural, environmental, energetic) are guiding design principles, adopting new building performance-based priorities for the design of cities, buildings and landscape. This emerging architecture places broadly defined performance above form making, It utilises digital technologies of quantitative and qualitative performance-based simulation to offer a comprehensive approach to the design of the build environment. Some aspects of “Performative Architecturei theories are critically examined and we report two experiments made using these procedures. The results try to give a contribution to detect some misunderstandings in relation to recent building projects shown

Intelligent Structures for Collaborating with the Architect

The number of different designers with different competencies collaborating in a building project is today conspicuous. An undesired consequence is the possible rise of conflicts between decisions taken independently by more than one specialist on the same building object. The early detection of such conflicts is then one of the most important features in collaborative design. Moreover, of great interest would be the possibility not only of automatic detection but also of solution proposal of at least the most manageable of those conflicts. In this perspective smart models of building components could be very useful. This is possible giving the building elements, represented as objects, the specific intelligence. A simple example of this possibility is given in this paper. In a precedent work we proposed a way of managing elementary spatial conflicts between building components tending to occupy the same spaces. The automatic detection derived from the previous declaration of two levels of constraints (soft constraint and hard constraints) in such way that a violation of them could be immediately signaled to the actor wanting to take the decision triggering the conflict. In this paper the topic is the consequences of the rise of a spatial conflict (occupation of the same space) between a column of a spatial frame of columns and beams, and another building object of any sort subject to a soft or hard constraint. The procedure identifies the minimum displacement of the two objects, propagates the column displacement to the other structural elements connected to it and checks the feasibility of the new configuration of the structural schema both with regard to the possible rise of new conflicts and with the compliance to previous structural criteria

Construction or Deconstruction: Which is the Best Way to Learn Architecture?

The actual shift of the teaching methods from teacher-centred expository methods, to learner-centred exploratory ones. The educational goals are no more the construction of a solid theory knowledge from which the behaviour is driven. It is the acquisition of capabilities and skills directly related to the professional activity. The consequence is that the teacher has the task of endowing the student not only with a large amount of documentation but also with at least suggestions of the way to use it. One of these suggestions is the deconstruction (in a literal and not philosophical sense) as a way of investigating the structure of buildings. In a first phase in order to acquire, through generalisation a systematic knowledge of the way the parts of a building (their subsystems) contribute to the global architectural organism. In a second phase in order to explore buildings of special interest aiming at mastering their peculiar solutions. An example of this method is presented, limited to the spatial analysis only both for brevity sake and for particular difficulties presented

Retrieval Tools in Building Case Bases

Most of the existing aids to building design rely on data base of cases representing solutions to problems that are thought to happen again at least in a similar way. Crucial for the success of the aid is the retrieval engine. In tour its efficiency depends on the way the cases are encoded. Whichever is this way cases will be represented at different levels of abstraction. The highest level will probably consist in an accessibility and adjacency graph. Another level could be a wire plan of the building. An easily workable representation of a graph is a square matrix. For any given building typology it is possible to write a list of encoded space types. This allows forming matrices that can be compared and their diversity measured. Here we present an algorithm that makes this job. Such an algorithm can be one of the case retrieval tools in the data base. It is likely that the designer has already some idea of the shape he wants for the building he is designing. A comparison between some geometric characteristics of the wire representation of the retrieved case and the corresponding ones of the imagined solution of the design problem can constitute a second test. The matching can be done

CoCoMa: a Collaborative Constraint Management System for the Collaborative Design

Collaborative Design is a topic of particular current interest. Existing software allows a multiplicity of designers to work on the same project. What the software really allows is accessing to a part of the information of the project and changing it. Sometimes there is a hierarchical distribution of the power of change: some participants can be permitted to operate only on some limited layers of the object representation. In this case the changes they propose are to be accepted by a general manager of the design process. What is lacking in this kind of software is the explicit management on the reciprocal constraints posed by different participants. In this paper, an elementary Collaborative Design System is presented whose main concern is just the management of constraints. Each participant designs the part of the project of his/her concern instantiating objects comprised of geometric description, alphanumeric variables and constraints on both. Constraints can be of two types: absolute or defined by a range of allowed values of the constrained variable. A participant intervening later can accept the constraint, choosing a value in the permitted range, or decide to violate it. In this case the proposed violation is signalled to whom posed it

The Architectural Envelope: an Assistant for Components Design Choices

The global envelope to day focuses on it a lot of attention from architects, progressively replacing the classical concepts of wall and roof. It is a complex component, entrusted with the delicate goal of mediating between exterior and interior space, between a space boundary and a bearing structure. Its main parts are the glass wall, a substructure resisting the loads and transmitting them to the bearing structure, and the connection of the two. The latter, in turn, comprises a fitting and a bracket. The set of relationships between these components and sub-components needs the control of many conditions of consistency. The tool presented is an Assistant performing just this task helping the designer to select in each project situation the best couple of two main envelope components: fitting and bracket. The Assistant structure lends itself to implement an intelligent commercial product catalog. It seems also fit to manage component selections strongly conditioned by consistency constrains between collaborating elements