Unstated contributions: how artistic inquiry can inform inter-disciplinary research

Since 1990, many creative disciplines, such as art, design and performance, have engaged increasingly with academic research. Accompanying this has been a good deal of interest in ways to employ their professional and creative practices as instruments of inquiry, just as previous disciplines have developed research methods that employ their specialist skills and knowledge. This raises questions about how research in the creative disciplines might contribute to knowledge and understanding. Research and practice in these fields may deal with matter that changes meaning with time or context, especially in art, where audiences may be expected to complete the meaning of creative works for themselves. This paper offers an oversight of these issues. It sets out some examples from the wider community that illustrate how incomplete or tacit contributions to inquiry can be a valuable and sometimes necessary part of the enterprise of creating knowledge, establishing a research model that is relevant in many areas, especially where disciplines collaborate. It goes on to set out tentative principles for such contributions.</p

Media Framing of Financial Mechanisms for Resolving Human–Predator Conflict in Namibia

The decline in carnivore populations is largely exacerbated by lethal methods used to reduce livestock depredation. Financial mechanisms are designed to limit lethal control by reducing the cost of depredation. The media can affect how the general public feel about issues like financial mechanisms but no study has been undertaken to understand the framing of this topic. This article filled this gap by using content analysis of newspapers to analyze economic incentives designed to mitigate human–carnivore conflict in Namibia. Forty-six percent of the articles were framed positively toward incentives, 24% ambivalently, 19% negatively, and 11% neutrally. Compensation was commonly framed positively whereas community-based conservation, trophy hunting, and tourism were framed ambivalently. Incentives were framed more negatively where perceived costs outweighed benefits. These results can help conservationists plan more effective communication interventions and anticipate issues that can affect the success of mitigation strategies

Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future

Additional booklet insert distributed at the VSMF Symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17The event looks forward. Scholarship (universities, research, teaching, publishing) has been slow to take up the opportunities of this digital century. This is an opportunity to identify and build the future.EPSRC (Pathways to Impact award). Unilever plc (Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics

Investigating our future: how designers can get us all thinking

This paper, and the presentation it represents, discusses the importance of bringing users into the design process and some of the techniques that can be employed to achieve that. Designing for older people is particularly challenging because most designers do not have direct experience of the ways that people’s lives and expectations change as they become older so it is even more important than usual to give the user a direct voice in the designing. However this is not straightforward. Most people find it difficult to visualise products and environments that do not exist at the moment so we need to help them imagine possibilities and express their needs and desires. Sheffield Hallam University has pioneered methods for using the designer’s creative talents to create situations that allow people to act out new situations and engage with the creative opportunities that they present. These methods are particularly important in the contemporary world where products are connected by complex information systems so we must attend to how people engage with both the physical aspects of a product or environment and the systems that underlie the

Designing for tacit learning: an investigation of design strategies for multimedia supported learning in the crafts

There is an increasing interest and activity in the design of interactive multimedia to support learning in all fields of education and training. However, most of the theory to support such developments is concerned with learning explicit knowledge and there is little guidance available to designers of material for learning in areas with an element of tacit knowledge such as craft skills. This paper describes the foundation work for a long-term project concerned with learning in traditional rural crafts but with the intention to provide a methodological framework for the design of multimedia-based learning in all areas of craft knowledge. A review of established theory of learning and the use of multimedia for learning in areas of explicit knowledge indicates some important basic principles, for example the need to understand the interaction between the teacher and learner in the context of the subject being taught and the need for clear narrative structures to avoid students becoming "lost" in the multiple pathways of interactive media. Observational studies of learning using educational video in a craft context and a study of an experienced craftsman/teacher teaching a group of learners, complemented by study of learning in related contexts, have allowed problems and issues to be identified and design strategies to be developed. While these are provisional they provide an overview of the design problems and have been used to plan a programme of experimental design and evaluation to test and develop principles of effective multimedia design for craft learning. </p

Fast Cash, Less Refund

This paper presents findings on the use of refund anticipation loans in North Carolina in 2007. Refund anticipation loans are high-cost, short-term loans made to tax filers who are owed a refund on their federal taxes. Calculations of APRs for these loans (RALs) can run above 150 percent on an annualized basis. The loans are used by people who are cash-strapped. Loans cost approximately $100, but they allow filers to get their taxes done without paying for their tax prep fees until their refund arrives. The transaction features make this an appealing product to poor working families. Accordingly, their use is highest in areas with high concentrations of poor working families. Our report uses data from the Internal Revenue Service. We focus on North Carolina. The quantitative research is supplemented with a market analysis of these loans. We note that the banks that provide a line of credit to these banks are suddenly constrained. Regulators have intervened to limit these loans. Their concerns include the safety and soundness of the deposits, as well as the inability of the bank partners to document that tax preparers are trained and in compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Fair Lending Act, and the Truth-In-Lending Act. We find that RALs are disproportionately utilized by tax filers in low-income and minority communities. We note that most of these filers qualify for a refund because they get the Earned Income Tax Credit. We compare the use of a RAL with IRA contributions. The report is complemented by GIS mapping

Micro-Sigmoids as Progenitors of Coronal Jets - Is Eruptive Activity Self-Similarly Multi-Scaled?

Observations from the X-ray telescope (XRT) on Hinode are used to study the nature of X-ray bright points, sources of coronal jets. Several jet events in the coronal holes are found to erupt from small-scale, S-shaped bright regions. This finding suggests that coronal micro-sigmoids may well be progenitors of coronal jets. Moreover, the presence of these structures may explain numerous observed characteristics of jets such as helical structures, apparent transverse motions, and shapes. In analogy to large-scale sigmoids giving rise to coronal mass ejections (CMEs), a promising future task would perhaps be to investigate whether solar eruptive activity, from coronal jets to CMEs, is self-similar in terms of properties and instability mechanisms.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Design enquiry: tacit knowledge and invention in science

For some years there has been discussion and speculation on the subject of "design enquiry" and a number of people, for example Richard Buchanan and Clive Dilnot , have looked for forms of enquiry appropriate to, or fruitful for, design as an academic and professional discipline. From a different perspective, Ranulph Glanville has suggested that the relationship between design and science might be redefined to acknowledge similarities of method that are disguised by forms of narrative employed by scientists. However most contributions in these debates deal with generalisations so I would like to propose some specific ways in which designers can explore and develop the concepts and practices of design enquiry. In particular I would like to discuss a kind of enquiry where designers can play a role in forming and pursuing questions which arise in the natural sciences and I will suggest that this role might be extended into some other fields. In doing so I will make reference to the subject of tacit knowledge, a concept which was formalised by Michael Polanyi in his consideration of the philosophy of science 50 years ago and which has attracted continuing interest (his 1958 book, Personal Knowledge, was reprinted most recently in 1998 and 2002), but also some shallow interpretation since then. I believe that Polanyi has a great deal to offer the design community, perhaps more in some respects than the widely cited work of Donald Schon who dealt with general questions of practice relevant to many disciplines while Polanyi addressed the relationship between enquiry and creativity in a very direct way. </p