1,720,958 research outputs found
Sustainable Renovation Framework: Introducing three levels of Integrated Design Process Implementation and Evaluation
No full textFuture sustainable building renovation is a balance between the economic and environmental impacts related to the desired social activities facilitated by the renovated building. A review of recent research has revealed that the present efforts on sustainable objectives fulfilment in renovation projects are not sufficient. This paper investigates processes and frameworks in building renovation. It aims to deal with simplification of the existing complexity due to involvement of various types of stakeholders, sustainability criteria and potential renovation technologies in design process. Moreover, it facilitates understanding of the design process implementation through identification of the different activities, which need to be carried out. Hereafter, two frameworks by application of different Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods are developed and for each one, three levels of decision-making and the required activities are provided. Finally, the decision-making at the third level is considered as a scientific design approach and is introduced as an integrated design process implementation and evaluation for the use of sustainability value-oriented criteria in design process. It helps stakeholders in the renovation process to discuss their project “on the same level” and results to make transparent decisions in a rational order
Towards a Holistic Approach to Retrofitting: A Critical Review of Stateof-the-art Evaluation Methodologies for Architectural Transformation
No full textThe building sector is well known to be responsible for a considerable part of the total European energy consumption. In the endeavor to implement radical reductions, there is an identified potential in addressing the existing building stock through deep renovations. These renovations make up complex, highly interdisciplinary systems. They involve stakeholders across a broad spectrum of disciplines and potentially affect the lives of a large number of occupants. The involved people bring different understandings of value in sustainability into a project and judge the outcome according to this understanding.
As a response to this, a number of sustainable assessment methodologies for the building industry, and specifically for that of retrofitting, have been developed to assist in the decision-making processes and ensure targeted results. However, these methodologies themselves represent a stance on sustainability as they assign weight to different sustainability indicators. As such, the same design may be assessed differently according to the chosen tool. As part of the research project RE-VALUE, this paper presents an evaluation of current practices in a Danish context through a systematic literature review of existing assessment tools. The paper presents the results of a metasynthesis, which highlights the focus areas of the individual tool as well as patterns and relationships between the tools. Based on the review we discuss a noticeable focus on quantitative, technical values in today’s ‘assessment practice’ and put forward the hypothesis that there is a need to rank qualitative, ‘non-technical’ values alongside quantitative values in order to deliver significantly improved building performance, which benefits the people who inhabit the built environment. This hypothesis is substantiated through an additional literature review, from which we propose a need to develop a holistic methodology for assessing architectural transformations in deep renovations
Towards a Holistic Methodology in Sustainable Retrofitting: Theory, Implementation and Application
No full textSustainability paradigm foresees a balance of energy production and consumption with no, or minimal, negative impact on environment (within the environmental tolerance limits). It gives an opportunity to a country to employ its potentiality of the social and economic activities. An overview of recent researches about building renovation context demonstrates the lack of an appropriate methodology and decision support framework -by compounding the typical challenges of sustainable retrofitting from theory to implement stages- that takes into account the retrofitting projects throughout more comprehensive insights and perspectives. It calls, therefore, for a deep building renovation approach. The major difference between a deep building renovation project and an ordinary one is commitment to a holistic approach. From one side, it initially should be able to deal with the society including various stakeholders with different priorities and barriers -on the top of the list is behavioral barriers about energy consumption- in order to improve their learning; to the other side, it has to perform multiple optimization through sustainability development perspective in its full sense. The intent is to identify, manage, and evaluate the renovation objectives through different available retrofitting alternatives during the early design stages. In this framework, the paper considers building renovation as a complex messy/wicked problem and later it gives details on how combinations of methods that are parts of SSM (Soft Systems Methodologies) and MCDM (Multi Criteria Decision Making) may support multiple perspectives of such a problem. The aim is to promote a methodology which is initially able to deal with complexity of the detected problem and subsequently to address building renovation process in order to involve the various stakeholders in the design process [and keep them involved in all design stages]. Doing so leads to more effective and sustainable retrofitting actions within different criteria including functionality, feasibility, and accountability
Sustainability focused decision-making in building renovation
Full text linkAn overview of recent research related to building renovation has revealed that efforts to date do not address sustainability issues comprehensively. The question then arises in regard to the holistic sustainability objectives within building renovation context. In order to deal with this question, the research adopts a multi-dimensional approach involving literature review, exploration of existing assessment methods and methodologies, individual and focus group interviews, and application of Soft Systems Methodologies (SSM) with Value Focused Thinking (VFT). In doing so, appropriate data about sustainability objectives have been collected and structured, and subsequently verified using a Delphi study. A sustainability framework was developed in cooperation with University of Palermo and Aarhus University to audit, develop and assess building renovation performance, and support decision-making during the project’s lifecycle. The paper represents the results of research aiming at addressing sustainability of the entire renovation effort including new categories, criteria, and indicators. The developed framework can be applied during different project stages and to assist in the consideration of the sustainability issues through support of decision-making and communication with relevant stakeholders. Early in a project, it can be used to identify key performance criteria, and later to evaluate/compare the pros and cons of alternative retrofitting solutions either during the design stage or upon the project completion. According to the procedure of the consensus-based process for the development of an effective sustainability decision-making framework which was employed in this study, the outcome can also be considered as an outset step intended for the establishment of a Decision Support Systems (DSS) and assessment tool suited to building renovation context
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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