THE TAX REVOLT

Public Economics,

An aesthetic for sustainable interactions in Product-Service Systems?

Copyright @ 2014 Greenleaf Publishing.Eco-efficient Product-Service Systems (PSS, in which the economic interest of the stakeholders involved in the offer continuously foster the optimisation of environmental resource consumption) represent a promising approach to sustainability. However, despite their potential win–win characteristics, the application of this concept is still limited. One key reason is that eco-efficient PSSs are often radical innovations and their adoption usually challenges existing customers’ habits (cultural barriers), companies’ organisations (corporate barriers), and regulative framework (regulative barriers). Starting from these considerations this chapter first investigates the barriers that affect the attractiveness and acceptance of eco-efficient PSS alternatives. A debate is then opened on the aesthetics of eco-efficient PSSs and the way in which aesthetics could enhance specific inner qualities of eco-efficient PSSs, i.e. facilitating and enhancing their wider diffusion. Through the analysis of several case studies, and integrating insights from semiotics, the chapter then outlines several research hypotheses on how the aesthetic elements of an eco-efficient PSS could facilitate user attraction, acceptance and satisfaction

An aesthetic for sustainable interactions in product-service systems?

Copyright @ 2012 Greenleaf PublishingEco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability. However the application of this concept is still very limited because its implementation and diffusion is hindered by several barriers (cultural, corporate and regulative ones). The paper investigates the barriers that affect the attractiveness and acceptation of eco-efficient PSS alternatives, and opens the debate on the aesthetic of eco-efficient PSS, and the way in which aesthetic could enhance some specific inner qualities of this kinds of innovations. Integrating insights from semiotics, the paper outlines some first research hypothesis on how the aesthetic elements of an eco-efficient PSS could facilitate user attraction, acceptation and satisfaction

Design: dall’oggetto al progetto

La progettualità, e quindi la possibilità di costruire identità culturali, è frutto di una incessante attività di interpretazione orientata verso un fine. La forma che diamo agli artefatti e all’esperienza è essa stessa interpretazione di un desiderio così come di una necessità o di un ideale sociale. È qui che entra in campo la semiotica. In particolare la semiotica che pone la massima attenzione ai processi interpretativi quale strumento di trasformazione e progetto

Design as translation activity: a semiotic overview

The paper moves from the following question: can the design activity, intended as inventive and project-making activity, be viewed also as a form of translation? The answer such question compels us to overcome a paradox, because design does not involve a transfer from a source text from which it translates. Design generally acts like a translator and interpreter of social needs that previously exist as unstructured, non-textual, open-ended entities, thus exposed to uncertainty and incoherence and striving through design to acquire a proper structure, i.e. a textual form. From the extensive literature on the subject in semiotics and linguistics, here we will select and outline only the fundamental semiotic models that could help us overcome the paradox at least from a theoretical viewpoint and provide a plausible answer to our opening question

Qual semiótica para o design? A via pragmatista e a construção de una semiótica do projeto

The project semiotic – the project one, not only the design one – should have as goal being put as a discipline of investigation to better understand the meaning of goods production, of social relations mediated by artifacts and in an ultimate analysis of the ways throughout human communities take form. In the pragmatist vision the future is not an object of forecast, like happens in some sciences – like meteorology – that have the task of informing us what might happen tomorrow. In pragmatism, to say in the pragmatist design, the future is pre-configured: displaying things in such a way that through it future might happen. Pre-configuration is the mental act that prepares the project. The pragmatist design, in resume, should be the way of projecting the world we live in, thinking about the consequences that, in all circumstances we may conceive, can influence our ways of acting and thinking. The pragmatic maxim we put in the center of our discourse tells us, in fact, that every projectual act is necessarily an open process, because it is dominated by the idea of possibility: every object of our conception foresees and prepares others. Signs may transform life, but we have to know how to manage them

Multidimensional Modeling of Type I X-ray Bursts. I. Two-Dimensional Convection Prior to the Outburst of a Pure Helium Accretor

We present multidimensional simulations of the early convective phase preceding ignition in a Type I X-ray burst using the low Mach number hydrodynamics code, MAESTRO. A low Mach number approach is necessary in order to perform long-time integration required to study such phenomena. Using MAESTRO, we are able to capture the expansion of the atmosphere due to large-scale heating while capturing local compressibility effects such as those due to reactions and thermal diffusion. We also discuss the preparation of one-dimensional initial models and the subsequent mapping into our multidimensional framework. Our method of initial model generation differs from that used in previous multidimensional studies, which evolved a system through multiple bursts in one dimension before mapping onto a multidimensional grid. In our multidimensional simulations, we find that the resolution necessary to properly resolve the burning layer is an order of magnitude greater than that used in the earlier studies mentioned above. We characterize the convective patterns that form and discuss their resulting influence on the state of the convective region, which is important in modeling the outburst itself.Comment: 47 pages including 18 figures; submitted to ApJ; A version with higher resolution figures can be found at http://astro.sunysb.edu/cmalone/research/pure_he4_xrb/ms.pd

Semiosic Processes and Design Processes. Inventiveness, Dialogue, Narrativity, Translation

Design semiotics could lead to two lines of research: the study of design products and the study of design processes. As much as the analysis of artifacts has significance, the survey about semiosic processes inside design processes is the one that defines the unique nature of semiotics in the design context. This investigation follows “the pragmatist route” to design semiotics, for two reasons: (1) because it understands design as an activity that leverages the concept of inventive abduction and can provide answers to cognitive challenges; (2) because the work of design is never to be conceived as concluded in the final result, but embedded in a f low of unlimited semiosis. I will focus on the concept of semiosis according to Peirce’s semiotics, understood as a process of production of sense. In this way, I will deal with the following four processes: 1. Inventiveness, whose logical model refers to abduction, the process that enables exploration of the ways to possible meanings. 2. Based on Bakhtin’s literary theory and Bohm’s epistemology, dialogicity, which will be considered as the social interaction model underpinning every social idea of design. 3. Narrativity, understood as the general scheme that is implemented in a project, understood as a series of actions leading to the achievement of a goal, and as a process of transformation. 4. Translation, considered not only as an interpretation process that takes place between different forms of expression, but especially as a transition from a problem or desire to an “interpretant artifact.