Design Matters, and so does Philosophy of Design 2003 John Eggleston Memorial Lecture

Why bother about philosophy of design?The theme of the 2003 DATA International Research Conference is ‘Design Matters’. If there is one country in the world that has shown this to be true for design and technology education, it is the UK. Design has had a well established place in general technology education for many years. This is demonstrated in the names of this subject: ‘Craft, Design and Technology’, and more recently ‘Design and Technology’. The particular emphasis on design becomes even more evident if one realises that internationally the name Technology Education is more common. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that in what is called ‘Technology Education’ design is always underestimated, but the fact that the word ‘design’ is an explicit element in the subject’s name in UK practice is meaningful

Concept learning in technology education

Learning concepts is an important domain within technology education. Not much research has been spent on it, unfortunately. Also it is not clear, how concepts can be learnt. In this paper some ideas about that will be presented. In particular the role of design as a pedagogical strategy will be highlighted.Keywords: concept learning, artifacts, structure, functio

Review: The student’s guide to research ethics

Title: The student’s guide to research ethics Author/Editor: Paul Oliver Publisher: Open University Press Publication Date: 2004 ISBN: Paperback 0-335-21087-2 Price: £16.99 Reviewed by: Marc de Vries, Eindhoven University, Netherlands

How focus creates engagement in Primary Design and Technology Education: The effect of well-defined tasks and joint presentations on a class of nine to twelve years old pupils

During a Design and Technology class, engagement is both required to start creative hands-on work and a sign of pupil’s creative thinking. To find ways to achieve engagement, we can look to the Montessori tradition. Due to the fact that learning is regarded as feeding insight through experimenting, tasks have to offer pupils the opportunity to gain knowledge about isolated details of the learning situation. This is realised by brief, simple and objective tasks combined with liberty to approach the hands-on work in one’s own way. Applied to Design and Technology, we can define brief, simple and objective tasks with a focus on a technique as an isolated detail of the learning situation. Offering liberty during hands-on work enables creative thinking.  The deployment of well-defined tasks with a focus on a technique is possible by dividing a complex assignment into a collection of brief tasks with single problems and working towards single objectives in the topic, making use of a single technique. Such a collection is a format that has the potential to enable ongoing engagement.  This case-study researches the actual effect of a stepwise organised collection of tasks on the design performance of pupils of nine to twelve years old. The results show that the tasks turned out to be useful in initiating engagement. In combination with joint presentations, ongoing engagement was achieved resulting in well-considered designs and products. In addition, dialogue with disengaged pupils delivered solutions towards engagement. As a side-effect of dialogue the teacher-pupil relationships and the pupil-pupil relationships improved

Exploiting the cracks: wedge issues in multiparty competition

This study examines the extent to which opposition parties engage in wedge-issue competition. The literature on wedge-issue competition has exclusively focused on the two-party system in the United States, arguing that wedge issues are the domain of opposition parties. This study argues that within multiparty systems opposition status is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wedge-issue competition. Since parties within multiparty systems compete in the wake of past and dawn of future coalition negotiations, parties that are regularly part of a coalition are not likely to exploit wedge issues as it could potentially jeopardize relationships with future coalition partners. Conversely, it is less risky for parties that have never been part of a government coalition to mobilize wedge issues. These theoretical propositions are empirically substantiated by examining the attention given to the European integration issue between 1984 and 2010 within 14 Western European countries, utilizing pooled time-series regressions

Dynamic control of selectivity in the ubiquitination pathway revealed by an ASP to GLU substitution in an intra-molecular salt-bridge network

Ubiquitination relies on a subtle balance between selectivity and promiscuity achieved through specific interactions between ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes (E2s) and ubiquitin ligases (E3s). Here, we report how a single aspartic to glutamic acid substitution acts as a dynamic switch to tip the selectivity balance of human E2s for interaction toward E3 RING-finger domains. By combining molecular dynamic simulations, experimental yeast-two-hybrid screen of E2-E3 (RING) interactions and mutagenesis, we reveal how the dynamics of an internal salt-bridge network at the rim of the E2-E3 interaction surface controls the balance between an “open”, binding competent, and a “closed”, binding incompetent state. The molecular dynamic simulations shed light on the fine mechanism of this molecular switch and allowed us to identify its components, namely an aspartate/glutamate pair, a lysine acting as the central switch and a remote aspartate. Perturbations of single residues in this network, both inside and outside the interaction surface, are sufficient to switch the global E2 interaction selectivity as demonstrated experimentally. Taken together, our results indicate a new mechanism to control E2-E3 interaction selectivity at an atomic level, highlighting how minimal changes in amino acid side-chain affecting the dynamics of intramolecular salt-bridges can be crucial for protein-protein interactions. These findings indicate that the widely accepted sequence-structure-function paradigm should be extended to sequence-structure-dynamics-function relationship and open new possibilities for control and fine-tuning of protein interaction selectivity

“Victims’ participation rights in the post-sentencing phase:The Netherlands in comparative perspective”

Victims’ rights have proliferated rapidly over the past decades. However, the development of rights in the post-sentencing phase has lagged behind. In this article, we argue that victims’ rights may contribute to the acknowledgement of victims, something that victimological research suggests is important for victims’ well-being at every stage of criminal proceedings. We review a new Dutch law and a legislative proposal aiming to improve victims’ rights in the post-sentencing phase in relation to conditional release from prison and conditional discharge from forensic psychiatric hospital. More specifically, we compare these (proposed) victims’ participatory rights with those existing in the Canadian, Belgian and German framework. We argue for a strengthened position of the victim in the post-sentencing phase. We close by showing that the practical effectiveness of these proposed rights is put at risk by COVID-19 and states’ response to the same