Designing the past: the National Trust as a social-material agency

The National Trust was founded in 1895 for ‘the preservation of places of historic interest or natural beauty’. While the distinction between the cultural and the natural seemed obvious at that time and members and visitors were not even implicated actors, we argue that the National Trust may be better understood as a co-constructed network effect of the social and material, which in turn affords social-material agency. There are currently 3.5 million members of the National Trust and 50 million visitors every year to National Trust properties, which include the largest collection of gardens in the world and over 300 historic houses and open-air properties. While the notion of design itself may seem to be an exemplar of the humanist love of agency, we argue (following Latour) that traditional notions of agency, which were asymmetrically distributed to the human actors, take insufficient cognisance of evident occasions of ‘material agency’ (Pickering, 1995) and the site of conservation is one site whereby the agency produced by social-material assemblages seems interesting and revealing. Whereas the social-material practices of design may seem in some tension with those of conservation, we argue in this paper that a close analysis of a particular site of conservation shows a manifold of ‘designing’ actors. Whatever the National Trust conserves could be considered as an example of particular and situated designs condensed from the interactions of humankind and nature. Similarly the visitor experience is also designed. While conservation can imply a certain social-material agency, it is much less well understood how conservation co-produces agency, and how these network effects serve the purposes of conservation by the Trust, visitors and other actors through the agency of the social and material. This paper will reveal some of the social-material practices which afford a visit to a property and what such visits afford the social-material practices of the National Trust

Format and basic geometry of a perspective display of air traffic for the cockpit

The design and implementation of a perspective display of air traffic for the cockpit is discussed. Parameters of the perspective are variable and interactive so that the appearance of the projected image can be widely varied. This approach makes allowances for exploration of perspective parameters and their interactions. The display was initially used to study the cases of horizontal maneuver biases found in experiments involving a plan view air traffic display format. Experiments to determine the effect of perspective geometry on spatial judgements have evolved from the display program. Several scaling techniques and other adjustments to the perspective are used to tailor the geometry for effective presentation of 3-D traffic situations

The water cycle in a changing climate

Millions of people across the globe are already affected by natural variability in the water cycle. A multidisciplinary team of experts from the University of East Anglia and the University of Nottingham, led by Timothy Osborn, Professor of Climate Science at the world-renowned Climatic Research Unit, set out the empirical evidence - and argue the need for implementation of measured adaptation mechanisms that take into account uncertainties in the projection of future precipitation patterns

Building the Back of Beyond: Government Authority, Community Life, and Economic Development in the Upper Little Tennessee Valley, 1880-1992

This dissertation investigates the relationships among government authority, community life, and economic development in the Upper Little Tennessee Valley. This area saw extensive growth during the first quarter of the twentieth century because of the exploitation of its timber and mineral resources. These industries introduced transient families into the area, contributing to the fragility of the economic and social structure. These transient families, like the longtime residents, embraced the regular paychecks industrial employment offered, and willingly participated in the exploitation of the area\u27s resources, sacrificing long-term sustainable growth for the short-to-medium-term security of a cash income. Following that period of rapid growth, the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the construction of TVA\u27s Fontana Dam cut off access to much of the area\u27s resource base and displaced many residents from their homes, disrupting the already tenuous threads holding the area\u27s communities together. Both transient families and longtime residents again adapted to the changing economic conditions by seeking whatever short-term financial security they could obtain. After the completion of the dam in 1945, residents found their economic options even more severely curtailed. Tourism provided the sole opportunity for escaping the poverty which a half century of extractive growth could not eliminate. By the 1990s, several communities in the Upper Little Tennessee had begun to use tourism as a means of economic growth, but their growth paled by comparison to neighboring counties adjacent to the National Par