Certified Organic Forests & Timber: the Hippocratic Opportunity

Organic farming was proposed in 1940 by Lord Northbourne as a response to chemical agriculture. Since then, organic agriculture has developed into an international A$50 billion industry with annual growth reported up to 30%. Currently it is one of the fastest growing food sectors with demand exceeding supply in many markets, and price premiums averaging 80% in Australia. With economic, and now environmental, incentives for planting trees, there is the opportunity, and even imperative, for a new silviculture category that embraces the precepts of organic agriculture. There are environmental, economic and ethical issues with carbon offset programmes that seek to reduce, or erase, the carbon footprint of an activity, while collaterally increasing the pesticide footprint; this may be a Faustian bargain. Certified Organic Forestry standards have made a tentative start with a modest uptake. Organic forestry offers a clean green, rather than a dirty green, option for carbon offsets, and can appeal to those inclined to a precautionary principle rather than a postcautionary principle approach. As consumers who are already familiar with the premises and promises of organic food and agriculture are attracted to carbon offsetting, this customer group has the potential to drive demand for Certified Organic Forestry. Moving beyond the current chemical forestry and silviculture standards to an organic silviculture presents a matrix of new opportunities, implications, impediments and even stakeholders

Design Thinking for Innovation. Stress Testing Human Factors in Ideation Sessions

This paper reports on a series of studies that attempt to unpick the factors that contribute to successful team ideation. Ideation is a popular, structured approach to creative thinking, where the goal is to produce many viable and innovative ideas and concepts. This is often accomplished through structured collaborative workshops that include ‘Design Thinking’ techniques and methods. The reported studies involved manipulating variables in controlled experiments with subjects (AKA ideators). The sample of ideators, were tasked with generating ideas to solve a challenge and the outcome of their work was measured by quantity and quality of output. The latter criterion was assessed by an expert panel using a standardised evaluation framework. Four variables were employed to understand idea generation success factors. These were identified as common and thus easily applied factors in typical ideation scenarios and included varying levels of participant stimulation (before sessions), presence or absence of a facilitator, application of ‘Design Thinking’ technique (or not) and lastly, participant profile based on professional background. In this case, participant characteristics were split between designers and non-designers. The different experiments were run, with participants generating ideas in a timeboxed activity in which their outputs were assessed against the various experimental conditions. The findings suggest that counter orthodox thinking, applying the methods (e.g. Round Robin) is less effective than the influence of ideators’ differing professional background and their level of stimulation. These conclusions in turn suggest the possibility of extending the effectiveness of workshop facilitation to increase efficiency and quality of output. The paper concludes with pointers on improving ideation. In particular, increasing levels of engagement and immersion among participants and using aspects of game theory are seen a possible areas of further investigation

Issues in Anti-Corruption Law: How Can Code of Conduct Laws Be Drafted in Order to Reduce Corruption in a Public Sector Like Romania’s?

International organisations, like the UN and EU, have encouraged their Member States for years to increase civil servants' compliance with particular codes of conduct. Romania represents probably one of the most advanced countries in attempting to legislate on civil servant ethics through its Code of Conduct Law. Yet, the Romanian Code of Conduct Law possesses significant weaknesses, emanating both from the inherent difficulties of using hard law in a soft law area (like civil servants' ethics) and the Law's silence as to specific procedures, which government agencies should use in implementing the Law. Given these weaknesses, Romanian government agencies should adopt regulatory instruments that compensate for these weaknesses at the legislative level. In this paper, we present the provisions—particularly related to the establishment of agency-level ethical doctrines—which regulatory drafters can use to implement these codes of conduct in a civil law system without running afoul of the basic requirements of civil law jurisprudence for clarity and predictability. We discuss the legal basis in Romanian administrative law for the elaboration of specific ethics-related doctrines and the ways in which such a ‘doctrinal approach’ to administrative ethics can help achieve the objectives of the flawed Code of Conduct Law. We specifically discuss the ways in which Romanian governments can adopt such regulatory instruments and the types of provisions that should be included in order to help overcome the flaws of the Code of Conduct Law.postprin

Augmenting objects at home through programmable sensor tokens: A design journey

End-user development for the home has been gaining momentum in research. Previous works demonstrate feasibility and potential but there is a lack of analysis of the extent of technology needed and its impact on the diversity of activities that can be supported. We present a design exploration with a tangible end-user toolkit for programming smart tokens embedding different sensing technologies. Our system allows to augment physical objects with smart tags and use trigger-action programming with multiple triggers to define smart behaviors. We contribute through a field-oriented study that provided insights on (i) household's activities as emerging from people's lived experience in terms of high-level goals, their ephemerality or recurrence, and the types of triggers, actions and interactions with augmented objects, and (ii) the programmability needed for supporting desired behaviors. We conclude that, while trigger action covers most scenarios, more advanced programming and direct interaction with physical objects spur novel uses.This work was supported by the 2015 UC3M Mobility Grant, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2014-56534-R, CREAx) and by the Academy of Finland (286440, Evidence)

Academic discourse on education during the early part of the pandemic

As the global COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden transition to emergency online education in early 2020, academic discourse quickly shifted to focus on the new situation and what could be learned from it. The present study gives an overview of the discourse on education during the pandemic in publications that appeared in the top-50 journals on the Clarivate Education list in the period April 2020–May 2021. Based on a final selection of 63 articles and 12 editorials, mostly on higher education, five main themes were identified: affect, teaching practice, teaching context, achievement and assessment, and equity. The academic discourse in these publications indicates that the emergency situation exacerbated previously existing issues: mental distress was observed to rise sharply for all stakeholders and gaps in access to education between different social groups widened. In response, teachers revisited the core values of education to guide them in approaching online teaching. Management focused less on procedures and communicated in a more human and empathic way. We argue that the acute interconnectedness experienced during the pandemic can be used to develop a pedagogy of care in which support is explicitly organized on both socio-emotional and academic levels

Creativity

Creativity and innovation go hand in hand. This book presents a plethora of creative interventions in education, culture, expressions, communications, and other areas. Each chapter brings forth a core idea well attested on the scales of creative interventions. It is a collaborative effort to bring forth multidisciplinary creativity in the ever-evolving world of design, communication, and possibilities. There is really no logical order to the book. You do not necessarily have to start at the beginning, just find a chapter that interests you and read. I hope that you find the book stimulating as well as informative

Thinking through the Design of Workspaces: A Participatory Design Tool for Space-creation in Offices

Architects often rely on verbal narratives of spatial needs to curate and design the spaces we see today. However, our needs and ways of living and working are rapidly changing, especially now. The pandemic has created paradigm shifts in professional setups, where there lies a need for flexible and multi-purpose spaces- A space once serving as a home now serves as a home office, and so on. There is also gravitation towards online tools for spatial visualization and the need to alter our existing working environments. This investigation aims to identify how a participatory design tool can help users break down the elements of a workspace and create spaces for specific activities in an office. The tool includes a physical probe⸻ comprising movable modular furniture elements seen in the 21st century office and a mobile application. The mobile app gathers user inputs on the type of space they need and provides sample activity-based-working (ABW) configurations for the user to choose from for their ideal space. Some examples of these configurations include spaces for brainstorming an idea, creating, hosting an event/meeting etc. Users can plan their spaces in advance with this tool. The research-creation combines the transforming capacity of spaces with flexibility and becomes a blueprint for end-users to become designers themselves. The physical probe facilitates personalization, model-making and scaling, and quick visualization while the mobile application serves as a user-manual and database for future community design practice