1,721,070 research outputs found
Kinetics of radiation-Cytochrome C-induced modifications in liposomes analysed by FT-Raman Spectroscopy.
No full textThe Spatial and Social Organisation of Teaching and Learning: The case of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Full text linkExisting research on school buildings and how their layout informs the spatial and social organisation of teaching and learning is scarce with an evidence base that has been called incomplete and underdeveloped in a 2005 report commissioned by the UK Design Council. Only a small handful of studies have analysed school buildings in the tradition of Space Syntax. Hence this paper aims to close this gap by systematically reviewing literature and proposing a theoretical framework for the future study of school buildings. Rather than focusing on an empirical case and post-rationalising phenomena found in the field, important concepts of the Space Syntax study of buildings as well as pedagogical theories are brought together upfront in a single conceptual framework. Only then is this framework applied to prove its feasibility and value. As a dataset, a well-known example from popular culture has been chosen to allow the framework to be easily comprehensible and perspicuous: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy, the fictional secondary school of Harry Potter and his friends as featured in the novels by Joanne K Rowling and the associated movie series. Floor plans of Hogwarts are analysed using Visibility Graphs and the movie material has been systematically evaluated in order to distinguish types of learning (individual, peer and taught learning) and map episodes of learning onto functional areas of the floor plan. Seven important dimensions are identified in the framework: 1) Accommodating different teaching styles; 2) Accommodating different processes of learning; 3) Strong or weak framing of the relationship between teacher and taught; 4) Movement economies; 5) The interfaces a building constructs; 6) The realisation of spatial and transpatial solidarities; and 7) Correspondence and non-correspondence models. The analysis of the Hogwarts narrative highlights the importance of social and public spaces for the accommodation of diverse learning processes: only 10% of learning in the movies occurred in classroom settings and the majority of peer learning took place in common rooms, dormitories and courtyards. It is also shown that peer learning tended to happen in more integrated spaces. The paper concludes that the framework can be fruitfully applied and delivers interesting insights into the spatial and social organisation of teaching and learning inside school buildings in relation to pedagogy. It proposes to shift the focus of attention away from classroom conditions in the architectural debate and instead embrace the idea that learning is social and occurs in many different settings and places, which puts the idea of the school building as a whole in its interplay between spatial elements and their connections high up on the agenda
Seeing and being seen inside a museum and a department store. A comparison study in visibility and co-presence patterns
Full text linkRegardless of their different purposes – one being educational and the other commercial, both museums and department stores show similarities in the structuring of spaces due to their nature of exhibiting material collections. Another overlap is found in their history of development, as they both had a purpose in reforming society. It is evident that inter-visibility among visitors inside these two buildings played a crucial role in this purpose. Therefore how inter-visibility is shaped by their spatial layouts is of interest. In this paper, co-presence, which is a fundamental element in creating interactions, is interpreted as a by-product of seeing and being seen among visitors in buildings. This paper is designed to study the patterns of co-presence within these two building types and to make comparisons across them. The study employs a new methodology, combining Edward Hall’s dimension of space and isovists, at room level to measure different degrees of co-presence. With this methodology, two sets of measures have been derived – boundaries and behaviours. Boundaries are based on visitors’ personal, social and public dimensions defined by Hall. Measures of behaviours are derived from directed isovists and categorised into three types: spectating, acting and interacting. The paper demonstrates how this methodology can be applied to quantify degrees of co-presence inside a selection of rooms in a museum and a department store in London in relation to their spatial configurations. Results indicate that the phenomenon of being seen is strongly associated with integration of spatial configurations. The relationship between these behaviours and spatial layout suggests that the patterns of co-presence seem to be generically formed by configurations. By introducing methodology to measure degrees of co-presence and comparing the different co-presence patterns generated by the two building types, the paper contributes to understanding of patterns of co-presence inside buildings at micro-scale
The Apple story: Spatial, functional and cultural parameters in branded architecture
Full text linkNumerous scholars from a wide array of disciplines have discussed the way in which flagship stores establish the use of physical space as a marketing device for the embodiment of a branded organisational identity. Apple is a particularly interesting example of the way the consistent and strategic consideration of customers’ experiences can be mediated by retail space. Apple is a brand that develops careful, strategic policies to compose unique experiences for its customers and simultaneously achieves constant redefinitions of its retail process in alliance with its marketing intentions. Therefore, this makes for a particularly interesting case study. Recently, Apple launched a new payment strategy where employees can conduct transactions all over the retail area by using mobile devices. This paper constitutes an attempt to understand the extent to which the new mobile practice has changed the Apple Store’s established dynamics and user experiences. The investigation is twofold: First the examination of the Apple Store in Regent Street at two different time periods, in 2009 and in 2014 allows capturing the introduction of a mobile payment strategy and resulting new behavioural dynamics. Second the comparison of two London based cases, the Apple Stores in Regent Street and Covent Garden allows identifying commonalities or variations on how the same organisational strategy is embedded in different configurations. The methodology combines analytical tools of space syntax with on-site observations of space usage. Results suggest that the functional dispersal of the purchase experience has changed the dynamics within Apple’s retail interiors with reflections on functional allocation, space usage behaviours and the layout’s performance. The analysis highlights that the functional distribution appears to have an impact on the operation of the recently introduced mobile payment method and that the way in which each retail interior incorporates organisational principles in relation to its spatial configuration affects the generated behavioural patterns. Overall, results revealed the complex interplay between spatial appearance, functional distribution, behavioural patterns, operational properties as well as cultural connotations. This study introduces a consistent way of analysing branded environments and organisational strategies through a multi-layered and temporal methodological approach that combines analytical tools of space syntax with observations of customers and staff behaviours. Overall, the paper offers a starting point for incorporating a framework of analysis that can enhance our current understanding of spatially configured branded experiences
Use of an online interactive space analysis tool to understand student perceptions of four secondary schools
Full text linkWith the sheer complexity of the built environment, understanding the aspects of the building that directly impact the occupants can be prohibitively difficult. Previous methods have been largely split between low-number, high-detail methods (photo-surveys or interviews), or high-number, low-detail methods (questionnaires). This study presents an alternative to these methods; creating an online tool that represents a navigable building, enabling the occupants to freely identify any aspect of the building that they feel is important. This online tool deliberately works in a manner similar to Google Street View, taking advantage of this familiarity to reduce the learning curve and maximise immersion. Using spherical images captured with a special camera or smartphone, each space in the building is captured and then uploaded into the online tool. Whilst in the online version of their building, the respondent can navigate through the building, make unguided comments about any part of the building. Using this tool, four recently built secondary schools were imaged and online versions created. In each school, students from three ICT lessons aged between 11 and 14 explored the online version of their school and marked parts of the building that were important to them. The students were asked to follow a typical day in the school, moving from lesson to lesson and to the spaces they use at breaks. The tool collected both the movement data and the comments, allowing analysis of not just the occupant attitudes, but also the route the students take through the building. The movement data for each school was compared to the visual graph analysis of the building, showing that the movement of the students within the tool resembles patterns seen elsewhere; configurational logic with attractors. The rich data that is generated in parallel with the movement data allowed insights into the way in which the students moved through the space and what was important to them
Spatial databases: Generating new insights on office design and human behaviours in the workplace
Full text linkSpace Syntax research has shown how human behaviours in the workplace are shaped by spatial configuration; in turn, evidence-based design practices have highlighted ways in which this data can be used to inform tailor-made solutions in office design. Yet, existing research focuses on either single case studies or comparisons of a few cases on a small scale. Also, each study uses its own methods and metrics which makes it difficult to establish wider patterns beyond single datasets. This paper presents a larger than usual data set on workplaces, which has been collected by Spacelab, a design and consultancy practice based in London. This dataset includes spatial and space usage information such as syntactic analysis and desk occupancy on client companies. It resides in a spatial relational database, allowing for systematic combination of the collected data, useful for doing either deeper analysis, or generating benchmarks and baselines. These insights are not only highly relevant to clients but also give rise to opportunities to generate new insights on office design and human behaviours in the workplace from a research perspective Two main research questions relating to the size of samples are discussed: Firstly, whether large samples are necessary to fully understand phenomena, and secondly, whether behavioural patterns vary across cases. Observation data and syntactic analysis are combined to understand in which areas of an office different activities take place. Observation data is also brought together with the functional allocations of space in order to ask whether activities follow the programme introduced by functions such as meeting rooms, kitchens, workspaces, etc. It is shown that observation data only becomes robust and reliable with longer periods of observations than previously recommended. Three to four full days seems to produce reasonably stable results for desk occupancy, while five full days seemed required for percentages of people walking and interacting. Some surprising findings were revealed regarding the distribution of activities in space, for instance dispelling the myth that interactions happen in corridors and highlighting that interactions tend to occur in rather segregated spaces. While it is argued that predictive power of the analysis varies, first steps towards establishing generic patterns have clearly been taken
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
Comparison of Renormalization Group Schemes for Sine-Gordon Type models
Full text linkThe scheme dependence of the renormalization group (RG) flow has been investigated in the local potential approximation for two-dimensional periodic, sine-Gordon type field-theoretic models discussing the applicability of various functional RG methods in detail. It was shown that scheme-independent determination of such physical parameters is possible as the critical frequency (temperature) at which Kosterlitz-Thouless-Berezinskii type phase transition takes place in the sine-Gordon and the layered sine-Gordon models, and the critical ratio characterizing the Ising-type phase transition of the massive sine-Gordon model. For the latter case, the Maxwell construction represents a strong constraint on the RG flow, which results in a scheme-independent infrared value for the critical ratio. For the massive sine-Gordon model also the shrinking of the domain of the phase with spontaneously broken periodicity is shown to take place due to the quantum fluctuations
- …
