Empowerment games : empathic design probes for user participation in community housing

This paper documents the empowering process of a group of public housing residents through different design probing exercises. These exercises worked along with existing social processes without any involvement of designers. This paper shows how a design researcher devised a series of probing tools called "empowerment games" with a group of active users. These games are self-learning tools for making the abstract language of design legible to users. The main purpose of this intitiative was to change the preconception of govenmental bodies and professional designers of the passivity of the users with regard to their designed environment. This was the first case of the application of a participatory design process in Hong Kong subsidized housing. Design empathy is a central skill when working with users throughout the whole design research project.

Numerical approximation of a fractional-in-space diffusion equation (II) - with nonhomogeneous boundary conditions

In this paper, a space fractional di®usion equation (SFDE) with non- homogeneous boundary conditions on a bounded domain is considered. A new matrix transfer technique (MTT) for solving the SFDE is proposed. The method is based on a matrix representation of the fractional-in-space operator and the novelty of this approach is that a standard discretisation of the operator leads to a system of linear ODEs with the matrix raised to the same fractional power. Analytic solutions of the SFDE are derived. Finally, some numerical results are given to demonstrate that the MTT is a computationally e±cient and accurate method for solving SFDE.