Engineering design processes in seventh-grade classrooms: bridging the engineering education gap

This paper reports on some findings from the first year of a three-year longitudinal study, in which seventh to ninth-graders were introduced to engineering education. Specifically, the paper addresses students’ responses to an initial design activity involving bridge construction, which was implemented at the end of seventh grade. This paper also addresses how students created their bridge designs and applied these in their bridge constructions; their reflections on their designs; their reflections on why the bridge failed to support increased weights during the testing process; and their suggestions on ways in which they would improve their bridge designs. The present findings include identification of six, increasingly sophisticated levels of illustrated bridge designs, with designs improving between the classroom and homework activities of two focus groups of students. Students’ responses to the classroom activity revealed a number of iterative design processes, where the problem goals, including constraints, served as monitoring factors for students’ generation of ideas, design thinking and construction of an effective bridge.

Protein monoubiquitination and polyubiquitination generate structural diversity to control distinct biological processes

Ubiquitination involves the attachment of ubiquitin (Ub) to lysine residues on substrate proteins or itself, which can result in protein monoubiquitination or polyubiquitination. Polyubiquitination through different lysines (seven) or the N-terminus of Ub can generate different protein-Ub structures. These include monoubiquitinated proteins, polyubiqutinated proteins with homotypic chains through a particular lysine on Ub or mixed polyubiquitin chains generated by polymerization through different Ub lysines. The ability of the ubiquitination pathway to generate different protein-Ub structures provides versatility of this pathway to target proteins to different fates. Protein ubiquitination is catalyzed by Ub-conjugating and Ub-ligase enzymes, with different combinations of these enzymes specifying the type of Ub modification on protein substrates. How Ub-conjugating and Ub-ligase enzymes generate this structural diversity is not clearly understood. In the current review, we discuss mechanisms utilized by the Ub-conjugating and Ub-ligase enzymes to generate structural diversity during protein ubiquitination, with a focus on recent mechanistic insights into protein monoubiquitination and polyubiquitination.

Toward a theory of the architectural subject

The extraordinary event, for Deleuze, is the object becoming subject – not in the manner of an abstract formulation, such as the substitution of one ideational representation for another but, rather, in the introduction of a vast, new, impersonal plane of subjectivity, populated by object processes and physical phenomena that in Deleuze’s discovery will be shown to constitute their own subjectivities. Deleuze’s polemic of subjectivity (the refusal of the Cartesian subject and the transcendental ego of Husserl) – long attempted by other thinkers – is unique precisely because it heralds the dawning of a new species of objecthood that will qualify as its own peculiar subjectivity. A survey of Deleuze’s early work on subjectivity, Empirisme et subjectivité (Deleuze 1953), Le Bergsonisme (Deleuze 1968), and Logique du sens (Deleuze 1969), brings the architectural reader into a peculiar confrontation with what Deleuze calls the ‘new transcendental field’, the field of subjectproducing effects, which for the philosopher takes the place of both the classical and modern subject. Deleuze’s theory of consciousness and perception is premised on the critique of Husserlian phenomenology; and ipso facto his question is an architectural problematic, even if the name ‘architecture’ is not invoked...

Sublime acts : desire in the studio

Acknowledging the recent call to review design creativity and consideration of the body's affective states in education, this paper explores how desire, conceptualized as an immanent force (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and an irresistible force (Burke, 1753) can be a means of deeper engagement within the design studio. Positing 'disruption or blockage' as a key agent which propels subjects from fields of normalcy to fields of otherness, and subsequently mobilises distinct modes of desire, this paper takes Edmund Burke's Romantic sublime and Patricia Yaeger's feminine sublime as critical lenses through which to review a first year interior program posited around the body. The paper highlights how the embodiment of 'desirous processes' within the design program and relational encounters within the studio represent an overarching pedagogical 'hinge' (Ellsworth, 2005). Rather than being a point of beginning, the start of first year is seen and experienced as a threshold opening to a new rhythm in a proces of becoming that is already underway.

The Empty City (playreading)

This 45 minute non-verbal intermedial performance for children was adapted from the picture book I authored of the same name. The process involved writing and re-writing text and music with the result being a new draft of both script and soundtrack. Part of the judging process for the award the script was nominated for involved a playreading, which offered a particular challenge to the researcher in terms of composition and playwriting. How can a script and soundtrack for a non-verbal, intermedial work adapt and innovate the within the formal and practical constraints of the traditional ‘playreading’? This project’s emphasis on nestling intermediality within ostensibly traditional theatrical constraints and processes draws on concepts of musicalisation, identified by Varopolou. (in Lehmann 2006:91) Certain ‘musical moments’ in the piece echoed Ross Brown’s (2010) acoustemological concepts of sonification of everyday life, and the process involved dynamic curation of ‘music under’ for emotional effect, avoiding cinematic clichés and reaching for connections between music and emotion characterized by scholars such as Juslin and Sloboda (2001) The resulting performance was a hybrid of playreading and slideshow, supported by an original soundtrack of ‘music under’ (pre-recorded, but ‘DJ’ed’ live) as well as text-driven moments where music and sound were foregrounded. Research contribution This iteration of The Empty City shows that the tradition of the playreading can be a playful space where even the multiple layers of an intermedial performance text can be represented. The Empty City was a finalist in the 2012-13 Queensland Premier’s Drama Award. A ticketed public playreading of the script was held in the Queensland Theatre Company’s Bille Brown Studio on the 28th of July 2012 alongside the other finalists.

Towards distributed citizen participation : lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland floods

This paper examines the rapid and ad hoc development and interactions of participative citizen communities during acute events, using the examples of the 2011 floods in Queensland, Australia, and the global controversy surrounding Wikileaks and its spokesman, Julian Assange. The self-organising community responses to such events which can be observed in these cases bypass or leapfrog, at least temporarily, most organisational or administrative hurdles which may otherwise frustrate the establishment of online communities; they fast-track the processes of community development and structuration. By understanding them as a form of rapid prototyping, e-democracy initiatives can draw important lessons from observing the community activities around such acute events.

First year industrial design studio-based teaching pedagogies and students’ engagement

Student engagement tends to be viewed as a reflection of learning processes, and in the context of first year university studies, it is a crucial means of an educational process that establishes the foundations for successful later year studies (Krausse and Coates, 2008). In the context of first year design studio teaching in higher education, fostering students’ positive engagement poses challenges to design educators as current trends set these design studios to be large size classes that makes difficult to manage and follow up students’ individual learning experiences. At QUT’s first year industrial design studio classes we engage in a variety of teaching pedagogies from which we identify two of them as instrumental vehicles to foster positive student engagement. Concept bombs and the field trip experience provide such platform as shown in student responses through a learning experience survey.

Open access to judgments : Creative Commons licences and the Australian courts

Internet technologies have fundamentally changed the way we obtain access to legal documents and information about the law. However, for judgments of courts and tribunals, copyright management and licensing practices have not kept pace with the digital and online technologies which are now ubiquitous in the web 2.0 era. Under the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 and the licensing statements on the Australian courts’ websites, judgments may generally be read online, downloaded, reproduced and printed out for personal, non-commercial use or ”in house” use by an organisation. However, beyond these permitted acts, the extent to which judgments can be copied and distributed in digital form online remains unclear. Open content licences (in particular, the Creative Commons (CC) licences) offer an effective mechanism for managing copyright in judgments in a manner that supports their wide public dissemination and reuse while also protecting their integrity and accuracy.

An open-source approach to music education through jam2jam XO

This article examines the philosophy and practice of open-source technology in the development of the jam2jam XO software for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computer. It explores how open-source software principles, pragmatist philosophy, improvisation and constructionist epistemologies are operationalized in the design and development of music software, and how such reflection reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of the open-source software development paradigm. An overview of the jam2jam XO platform, its development processes and music educational uses is provided and resulting reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of open-source development for music education are discussed. From an educational and software development perspective, the act of creating open-source software is shown to be a valuable enterprise, however, just because the source code, creative content and experience design are accessible and 'open' to be changed, does not guarantee that educational practices in the use of that software will change. Research around the development and use of jam2jam XO suggests that open-source software development principles can have an impact beyond software development and on to aspects of experience design and learning relationships.

The creative citizen : understanding the value of design education programs in the knowledge economy

The knowledge economy relies on the diffusion and use of knowledge as well as its creation (Houghton and Sheenan, 2000). The future success of economic activity will depend on the capacity of organisations to transform by increasing their flexibility. In particular, this transformation is dependant on a decentralised, networked and multi-skilled workforce. To help organisations transition, new strategies and structures for education are required. Education systems need to concentrate less on specialist skills and more on the development of people with broad-based problem solving skills that are adaptable, with social and inter-personal communication skills necessary for networking and communication. This paper presents the findings of a ‘Knowledge Economy Market Development Mapping Study’ conducted to identify the value of design education programs from primary through to tertiary level in Queensland, Australia. The relationship of these programs to the development of the capacities mentioned above is explored. The study includes the collection of qualitative and quantitative data consisting of a literature review, focus groups and survey. Recommendations for the future development of design education programs in Queensland, Australia are proposed, and future research opportunities are presented and discussed.

Realizing 'four comforts' in the urban fringe : the case of White Horse Lake Eco-creative City Project, Hangzhou, China

This article examines a cultural and creative industries park project – the White Horse Lake Ecocreative City on land outside the urban centre of Hangzhou, China, which uses an imaginary rural lifestyle as its key attraction. By analysing government policies and development plans, and through interviews with initiators, managers and creative practitioners, the article first assesses the geographical position, that is, the impact of locality with regard to both hard and soft infrastructure of the project; it then examines the synergies and tensions embedded in the strategic goals, that is, to build the right city for ‘four comforts’ (siyi, 四宜) – for residence, for business, for travel and for culture. The article concludes that Chinese-style cultural conversion remains locked in a top-down ideological framework, one that rural residents and the new ‘creative class’ are expected to respect.

Proceedings of the Interior Space in Other Places : An IDEA [Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association] Symposium [Edited Volume of Proceedings]

Conference curatorial outline The focus of this symposium was to question whether interior design is changing relative to local conditions, and the effect globalization has on the performance of regional, particularly Southern hemisphere identities. The intention being to understand how theory and practice is transposed to ‘distant lands’, and how ideas shift from one place to another. To this extent the symposium invited papers on the export, translation and adoption of theories and practices of interior design to differing climates, cultures, and landscapes. This process, sometimes referred to as a shift from ‘the centre to the margins’, seeks new perspectives on the adoption of European and US design ideas abroad, as well as their return to their place of origin. Papers were invited from a range of perspectives including the export of ideas/attitudes to interior spaces, history of interior spaces abroad, and the adoption of ideas/processes to new conditions. Paralleling this trafficking of ideas are broader observations about interior space that emerge through specificity of place. These include new and emerging directions and differences in our understanding of interiority; both real and virtual, and an ever-changing relationship to city, suburb and country. Keeping within the Symposium theme the intention was to examine other places, particularly on the margins of the discipline’s domain. Semantic slippage aside, there are a range of approaches that engage outside events and practices enabling a transdisciplinary practice that draws from other philosophical and theoretical frameworks. Moreover as the field expands and new territories are opened up, the virtual worlds of computer gaming, animations, and interactive environments, both rely on and produce new forms of expression. This raises questions about the extent such spaces adopt or translate existing theory and practice, that is the transposition from one area to another and their return to the discipline.

Critical timescales and time intervals for coupled linear processes

In 1991, McNabb introduced the concept of mean action time (MAT) as a finite measure of the time required for a diffusive process to effectively reach steady state. Although this concept was initially adopted by others within the Australian and New Zealand applied mathematics community, it appears to have had little use outside this region until very recently, when in 2010 Berezhkovskii and coworkers rediscovered the concept of MAT in their study of morphogen gradient formation. All previous work in this area has been limited to studying single–species differential equations, such as the linear advection–diffusion–reaction equation. Here we generalise the concept of MAT by showing how the theory can be applied to coupled linear processes. We begin by studying coupled ordinary differential equations and extend our approach to coupled partial differential equations. Our new results have broad applications including the analysis of models describing coupled chemical decay and cell differentiation processes, amongst others.

Lignocellulosics as a renewable feedstock for chemical industry : chemical hydrolysis and pretreatment processes

Lignocellulosic materials including agricultural, municipal and forestry residues, and dedicated bioenergy crops offer significant potential as a renewable feedstock for the production of fuels and chemicals. These products can be chemically or functionally equivalent to existing products that are produced from fossil-based feedstocks. To unlock the potential of lignocellulosic materials, it is necessary to pretreat or fractionate the biomass to make it amenable to downstream processing. This chapter explores current and developing technologies for the pretreatment and fractionation of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of chemicals and fuels.

Marcel Cousins : every little thing

This review considers the artwork of Melbourne artist Marcel Cousins showed at Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane in April 2012. The review traces Cousins' doctoral study in Tokyo. It then assesses his paintings and installations that explore the transformation of generic objects in exhibition contexts, as well as the aesthetic dimensions of such processes.