Identity and affect in design cognition

Much Design Research effort has been afforded to investigating how designers think and what they do; often in the form of protocol analysis. These investigations have mainly focused on how designers influence material culture however, little attention has been paid to another line of enquiry; that is how the act of designing affects the individual undertaking the work and the role of social psychological phenomena e.g. attitudes, evaluations, emotions, impressions, motivations and social behaviour - on design activity. This interplay of affect between design activity and a designer’s social psychological behaviour is a complex two way process that warrants further investigation. Our research agenda focuses on the individual undertaking design activity and asks how does designing affect the designer and their behaviour? In this paper two issues are addressed: 1. The immediate effects of design activity on the designer 2. The role of self-concept in design cognition These two issues are investigated through a series of experiments carried out under semi-controlled conditions using several forms of observation and novel self-concept inventories. This paper draws attention to the need to consider self-concept and affect in design cognition and introduces the idea of design identity, which is uniquely different to the concept of design experience often quoted in the literature. This is an area of the ongoing research agenda within the Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, UK. Keywords: Design Activity; Design Behaviour; Psychology of Design; Self-Concept; Immediate Effects</p

Correlated correlation functions in random-bond ferromagnets

The two-dimensional random-bond Q-state Potts model is studied for Q near 2 via the perturbative renormalisation group to one loop. It is shown that weak disorder induces cross-correlations between the quenched-averages of moments of the two-point spin/spin and energy/energy correlation functions, which should be observable numerically in specific linear combinations of various quenched correlation functions. The random-bond Ising model in (2+epsilon) dimensions is similarly treated. As a byproduct, a simple method for deriving the scaling dimensions of all moments of the local energy operator is presented.Comment: AMS-LaTeX. 12 pages, 1 figur

Online interactivity: best practice based on two case studies

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explore best practice in the effective support of online interactivity. Five key issues related to best practice are delineated, based on the experience derived from two case studies. The first case study involved online, collaborative work carried out by twenty-six conversion M.Sc. students following a module on‘Interactive Multimedia Systems'. The online group work was structured around the production of essay-style critiques and the development of prototype multimedia resources. The discussions were structured using the bulletin board facility in WebCT. The second study involved sixty-four second-year undergraduate students following a module on‘Communication via Multimedia’. These students were involved in assessed online discussion groups that aimed to foster a community in enquiry and provide an opportunity for vicarious learning. The assessed discussion groups were based on Netscape Collabra. A comparison of the experience of these two case studies led to the identification of a set of five key issues relating to best practice in the effective support of online interactivity. The first four issues concern the design and implementation of the online learning experiences. The fifth issue involves reflection and improvement on the interventions mad

Editors' Welcome

Welcome! We are excited to present the first issue of Pennsylvania Libraries: Research &amp; Practice. Also known as PaLRaP, this new publication is for anyone who works in or cares about libraries in Pennsylvania.</jats:p

How Very Massive Metal Free Stars Start Cosmological Reionization

(Abridged) Using ab initio cosmological Eulerian adaptive mesh refinement radiation hydrodynamical calculations, we discuss how very massive stars start the process of cosmological reionization. The models include non-equilibrium primordial gas chemistry and cooling processes and accurate radiation transport in the Case B approximation using adaptively ray traced photon packages, retaining the time derivative in the transport equation. Supernova feedback is modeled by thermal explosions triggered at parsec scales. All calculations resolve the local Jeans length by at least 16 grid cells at all times and as such cover a spatial dynamic range of ~10^6. These first sources of reionization are highly intermittent and anisotropic and first photoionize the small scales voids surrounding the halos they form in, rather than the dense filaments they are embedded in. As the merging objects form larger, dwarf sized galaxies, the escape fraction of UV radiation decreases and the HII regions only break out on some sides of the galaxies making them even more anisotropic. In three cases, SN blast waves induce star formation in overdense regions that were formed earlier from ionization front instabilities. These stars form tens of parsecs away from the center of their parent DM halo. Approximately 5 ionizing photons are needed per sustained ionization when star formation in 10^6 M_sun halos are dominant in the calculation. As the halos become larger than ~10^7 M_sun, the ionizing photon escape fraction decreases, which in turn increases the number of photons per ionization to 15-50, in calculations with stellar feedback only. Supernova feedback in these more massive halos creates a more diffuse medium, allowing the stellar radiation to escape more easily and maintaining the ratio of 5 ionizing photons per sustained ionization.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, accepted to ApJ. Final version. High resolution images and movies available at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~jwise/research/Reionizatio