Service learning, educational innovation and social transformation

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Working with waste to dignify human existence through collage as spontaneous design

Working with waste to dignify human existence through collage as spontaneous desig

Sustaining Sao Paulo: uniting different academic perspectives through design

Design is said to be central in unifying a holistic understanding of complex systems. It must amalgamate knowledge from ‘art’, ‘literature’, ‘music’, ‘philosophy’, ‘math’, ‘science’, ‘technology’, ‘social science’ and more, with its own understanding. But within these subjects are more defined individual interests that must interweave and complement other qualities. This paper presents a glimpse of what lies underneath the disciplinary institutional nomenclature that administers and organizes knowledge into collective identities that may not usually interact beyond the boundary of a subject. Under the guise of ‘bridging the gaps’ between STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering math) and non-traditional partners such as arts, humanities, or social science, efforts to expose diverse interests in sustainable urbanism for São Paulo are explained here. Towards consilience best describes the intention and willingness of diverse disciplinary perspectives that come together and share expertise and knowledge in the service of sustainability

The ephemeral aesthetic of spontaneous design on the streets of Sao Paulo

There are few opportunities when the poor and prosperous can be spoken about with respect to the same, shared cultural experience. And yet, visual culture, and the design process that contributes to its materialisation in specific contexts, offers an opportunity to recognise a socially inclusive activity that reveals similarity rather than difference. This paper celebrates an ephemeral aesthetic that is appreciated by people at different ends of the economic, political and social spectrum. A mutual appreciation for the medium of collage differs only in terms of the environment within which the recycled object is eventually revealed. This paper explores some of these different contexts, and those who recognise and practise this phenomenon in a South American and European context. The conclusion of this speculative and exploratory study is that there is potential to develop this unique medium as an accessible and inclusive visual language, giving voice to those who often do not have the opportunity or the means to speak and be heard. Collage is recognised as a channel that mediates between social exclusion and inclusion when political and economic means have been exhausted. The resulting ephemeral aesthetic is proven to have visual appeal, satisfying lowand high-order human needs

Education as a practice of affiliation: facilitating dialogue between developed and developing nations

Exploring Design research and Design education that straddles developing and developed world contexts is the aim of this paper. It is a bold ambition to identify the key debates that inform these two significant aspects of Design – much too big to cover in the limited space here. Nevertheless we speculate on some of the issues that emerge from within Architecture, Urbanism, Philosophy, Sociology, Geography, Education and Design. We do this through the idea expressed by Lang that ‘affiliation’ is the need that links to all other human needs. We hypothesize that affiliation, and our need for belonging not only within our local communities, but also at a global scale, is a central concern that links research and education in developing and developed world contexts. Some design practitioners are shown to be tackling this problem, but too often these are single projects limited in scale. We maintain that these worthwhile and noble efforts must be scaled up to deal with problems of urban planning through first, second, third and fourth order design concerns, recognizing that whilst contemporary design is increasingly occupied with ‘interaction’ and ‘environment’, the established preoccupation with ‘symbols’ and ‘things’ remains out of reach for millions of urban poor. In fact, urban designers consider ‘symbols of affiliation’ as central to city dwelling. Design research and design education must therefore aspire to a material democracy that judges the appropriateness of each given situation on its merits, recognizing the need at times for basic material provision

Space-and-place modelling-and-making: a dialogue between design and geography

Geography and design have much in common. Both draw from or reflect science, social science, humanities, and employ sophisticated technology to achieve their aims. However, aside from a mutual interest in urbanism, there appears to have been little collaboration between the two. And yet some aspire for design to learn from geography. In this paper we explore how the characteristics associated with geography and design may function together in a space-and-place modelling-and-making dialectic

From greed to need: notes on human-centred design

This exploratory paper identifies some of the critical debates that have resulted in the city problematic. The context for this discussion is the need for transition from an approach to design that serves the few who are economically privileged, to a situation whereby design confronts some of the challenges associated with the less fortunate in our global society. A key outcome of the inquiry is that a better understanding of affiliation is essential if interdisciplinary design process is to succeed

Dreaming sustainability, realising utopia: ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’ in art and design practice

Throughout the twentieth century, the disciplines and practices of artists and designers were convergent and divergent in the way they developed similar ideas identified now with sustainability. Whilst under early modernism, artists concerned themselves with the retention of ‘aura’ (Benjamin [1936] 2008), designers released this in pursuit of reproduction. Consequently, designers discarded individuality for commonality, and old for new in the guise of economic and technological advancement, whereas artists concerned themselves with cultural artefacts. Both had social impact. The designer’s grasp of systems thinking and reproductive methods as ‘social systems’ (Nelson and Stolterman 2012) set against the modernist artist’s preference for the oneoff characterized different motivations. Subsequently, in the second half of the twentieth century design became closely associated with the mass-production and promotion of products, but subsequently became implicated in consumer culture and the massive problem of waste (Walker 2014). Design’s deviation towards ‘wicked’ problem solving on a global scale – often to improve social and economic well-being – before the challenge of sustainability came to light, sits in contrast to art’s concern for individuality. There are a few exceptions. In 2004, in Beyond Green, Stephanie Smith brought together a series of sustainable art and design projects – such as the Learning Group’s Collecting System - arguing that the convergence of these two strands can provide rich opportunities to rethink approaches to environmental questions, as both shared a goal of bringing social and aesthetic concerns together with environmental and economic ones (Smith 2006). Yet, when systematic approaches to the problem of waste are discussed in terms of integrated sustainable waste management frameworks, the potential contribution of artistic strategies and methodologies is absent and the opportunity for an expanded view of design to readdress concerns is overlooked. Are we to assume it to be buried in the socio-cultural aspects of environmental and contextual concerns? Or is it also related to the financial/economical, technical, environmental/public health, institutional, and policy/legal aspects of waste management frameworks? This paper makes explicit the potential for specific socially-engaged art practices to contribute to a waste discourse about re-purpose, re-use and appropriation. We also challenge notions that design as a product of modernist twentieth-century thinking emanating from early modern art practice is devoid of re-use, by positioning ‘practical meaning’ as a paradox of scale and context

Bond energy/eond order relationships for N-O linkages and a quantitative measure of ionicity: the rôle of nitro groups in hydrogen bonding

The nitro group is active in metabolic systems and can be found as an integral part of a number of useful curative drugs and many toxic substances. The basis for much of this activity is not fully understood. It is not necessarily caused directly by through-bond electronic effects but may also be due to direct H-bonding to nitro or to indirect interference by the nitro group with existing H-bonding. An unusual effect of a nitro substituent on kinetic results from urethane addition/elimination reactions (Scheme 1) has been ascribed to some form of self-association, which was neither specified nor quantified. To investigate self-association phenomena caused by a nitro group, a bond energy/bond order formula for N–O bonds has been developed and then used to interpret relative amounts of covalent and ionic contributions to total N–O bond energy. Calculated bond energies were then used to obtain enthalpies of formation for H-bonds to nitro groups in crystals and in solution. Similar results from solution data reveal that direct H-bonding to nitro is much weaker than in crystals, unless intramolecular H-bonding can occur. The results revealed that the 'self-association' effects observed for nitro substituents in urethanes (Scheme 1) were not caused by nitro participating directly in intermolecular bonding to NH of another urethane but by an indirect intramolecular action of the nitro group on pre-existing normal NH–O amide/amide type H-bonding

The theory of quantum levitators

We develop a unified theory for clocks and gravimeters using the interferences of multiple atomic waves put in levitation by traveling light pulses. Inspired by optical methods, we exhibit a propagation invariant, which enables to derive analytically the wave function of the sample scattering on the light pulse sequence. A complete characterization of the device sensitivity with respect to frequency or to acceleration measurements is obtained. These results agree with previous numerical simulations and confirm the conjecture of sensitivity improvement through multiple atomic wave interferences. A realistic experimental implementation for such clock architecture is discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 6 Figures. Minor typos corrected. Final versio