1,720,957 research outputs found
Innovating products in the humanitarian sector: how to ensure adequate response in a challenging ecosystem,
No full textThe humanitarian sector requires innovation to enhance emergency response efficiency and effectiveness. This paper examines the sector’s unique challenges, including complex emergencies, specialized products, diverse actors, and barriers to innovation. To address these, UNHRD has revamped its approach, blending accelerator initiatives with design-driven activities via its Innovation Lab. A task force of academics and experts is developing a tailored workflow integrating product design and business process management to improve decision making. Efforts like market scouting, innovation contests, and in-house R&D aim to overcome current limitations,
fostering collaboration among stakeholders. This approach offers a more adaptive and inclusive innovation ecosystem
The idea of robust technology in the definition of a third-world practice : architecture, design and labour training
No full textThesis (PhD) -- University of Melbourne, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, 201
Circularity by stock in Sri Lanka: Economic necessity meets urban fabric renovation
No full textPersistent fiscal and political mismanagement, together with the financial pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, have driven Sri Lanka into a social and economic crisis triggering a decrease in national foreign exchange reserves, an inability to purchase vital imports, and an unprecedented rise in internal inflation rates. Within the correspondingly distressed construction sector, the idea of 'design circularity' gains natural impetus beyond eco-system protection and responsible consumption views, as a critical strategy for responding to the material and fiscal scarcity of the country's by-now relatively closed economy. This is also in light of the fact that the post-independence history of industrial policy in the island has produced an urban landscape characterised by large underused and increasingly derelict building stock with a significant potential - and need - to be programmatically reorganised, technically recycled, and spatially and culturally re-designed. This paper moves from the proposition that, for 'circularity' to be of use at the scale required, its design application must expand beyond conventional interpretations of material recycling, to acknowledge the overall building fabric as a critical, transformative resource available to be renewed or reborn, with varying degrees of reforms as called by the existing opportunities, underlying programmatic needs, and/or industrial constraints. In facilitating this function, architectural design has an important role to play, as particular sets of design strategies must be employed to handle the inevitable complexities between structure and form, material and content, and product and process, against a reflective understanding of local building logic, challenges and potential. To that end, professional design can help foster design approaches to resolve the technical intricacies of building fabric transformations, to strategise actions concerning work procurement and economic planning, and to provide the leading agency in setting up future-industry configurations. How this approach could inform and affect broad market notions of design circularity for Sri Lanka is evaluated through the review of three projects that focus on different programmatic transformations (residential-to-residential, residential-to-recreational, and commercial-to-recreational), are set within different geographical locales (city, periphery and in-between), and situated in and around Kandy, Sri Lanka's second largest city. The projects illustrate possible tactics for intervening on the existing fabric whilst considering the benefits of each and articulating the structural challenges for the practices involved.FA
Robustness as a Design Strategy: Navigating the Social Complexities of Technology in Building Production
No full textThis paper examines the role of architects in identifying and implementing design strategies that enhance labour skills, facilitate technology transfer, and support capacity building in developing economies. It examines whether specific design approaches can introduce technological robustness to address the social, cultural, and economic challenges of construction in fragmented industrial environments. The study develops a normative framework for ‘technological robustness,’ which counteracts socio-technical fragmentation and promotes resilient, adaptable building practices in low-resource settings. Through a practitioner-researcher case study of a community library project in Sri Lanka, the paper illustrates how design strategies can expand operational capacity, adjust to variations in workmanship, and encourage organic skill development on real construction sites. The research offers two main contributions: a scalable, structured design methodology that guarantees technical adaptability, cultural relevance, and economic resilience; and an empirical example demonstrating how design can actively generate opportunities for capacity building within fragmented socio-technical systems. Overall, the framework provides practical pathways to enhance construction outcomes in developing economies
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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