Suchergebnisse

There are many examples of initiatives involving design students collaborating with African artisans to produce new products, but these have generally been students from institutions outside Africa who have been 'helicoptered' in leaving little, if any, positive legacy from the encounter. This paper presents an alternative case study of South African design students combining participatory design methods with craft practice as a means of equitable engagement during a weeklong workshop with local artisans. The encounter took place in Stellenbosch, South Africa in 2014 and was one of the outcomes of the wider doctoral research that asked what role does practice play in collaboration between designers and African craft producers? Second year illustration students from the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography paired with local craft artisans. The resonance of participatory design methodology with the African notion of ubuntu, which speaks of people's interconnectedness, is described. A localised knowledge sharing, collaborative, co-creative and experiential workshop methodology is presented as an alternative to the usual paradigm of philanthropic, top down, pedagogic, designer-led, short-term interventions. Thus returning the focus to the local, leading to socially based craft practice as a way to democratise the relationship between the students and the artisans.

In this article we share an example of challenge-driven learning in design education and consider the contribution of such approaches to the weaving of communities-in-place. We describe the research and practice of the Public Collaboration Lab (PCL), a prototype public social innovation lab developed and tested via a collaborative action research partnership between a London borough council and an art and design university. We make the case that this collaboration is an effective means of bringing capacity in design to public service innovation, granting the redundancy of resources necessary for the experimentation, reflection, and learning that leads to innovation—particularly at a time of financial austerity. We summarize three collaborative design experiments delivered by local government officers working with student designers and residents supported by design researchers and tutors. We identify particular qualities of participatory and collaborative design that foster the construction of meaningful connections among participants in the design process—connections that have the potential to catalyze or strengthen the relationships, experiences, and understandings that contribute to enrich communities-in-place, and infrastructure community resilience in the process.

Written laws, records and legal materials form the very foundation of a democratic society. Lawmakers, legal scholars and everyday citizens alike need, and are entitled, to access the current and historic materials that comprise, explain, define, critique and contextualize their laws and legal institutions. The preservation of legal information in all formats is imperative. Thus far, the twenty-first century has witnessed unprecedented mass-scale acceptance and adoption of digital culture, which has resulted in an explosion in digital information. However, digitally born materials, especially those that are published directly and independently to the Web, are presently at an extremely high risk of permanent loss. Our legal heritage is no exception to this phenomenon, and efforts must be put forth to ensure that our current body of digital legal information is not lost. The authors explored the role of the United States law library community in the preservation of digital legal information. Through an online survey of state and academic law library directors, it was determined that those represented in the sample recognize that digitally born legal materials are at high risk for loss, yet their own digital preservation projects have primarily focused upon the preservation of digitized print materials, rather than digitally born materials. Digital preservation activities among surveyed libraries have been largely limited by a lack of funding, staffing and expertise; however, these barriers could be overcome by collaboration with other institutions, as well as participation in a large-scale regional or national digital preservation movement, which would allow for resource-sharing among participants. One such collaborative digital preservation program, the Chesapeake Project, is profiled in the article and explored as a collaborative effort that may be expanded upon or replicated by other institutions and libraries tackling the challenges of digital preservation.

The Public Collaboration Lab (PCL) is an action research partnership between the London Borough of Camden (LBC) and the University of the Arts London, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research explored the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education (DHE) and local government (LG), and how design research and practice can contribute to service, policy and social innovation in the LG context. The project prototyped and piloted a new way of working that identified and leveraged synergies in the operational objectives of LG and the learning objectives (research and teaching) of DHE. The poster shares findings from the research in the form of an 'anatomy' of LG/DHE collaboration, which articulates and visualizes the internal workings of LG/DHE. The 'anatomy' serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to reflect on collaborative projects by inputting data to the models to visualize their activities; and as a generative tool, providing a set of templates that focus discussion around the planning of collaborative projects.

This exhibition introduces the Public Collaboration Lab (PCL), a one-year research project that explores the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education and local government to better engage council staff and the citizens they serve, in the development and application of design-led approaches to social challenges and to inform policy. It displays a selection of practice-based PCL collaborative design engagement tools that provide a site for argument, debate and exchange between participants in the process of creative engagement. Taking these tools as a starting point, the mini-workshop explores the various definitions of such tools (thing, boundary object, cultural probe, etc.), discussing their role in participatory design research.Full text at ACM

This paper describes the exhibition that introduces the Public Collaboration Lab (PCL), a one-year research project that explores the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education and local government to better engage council staff and the citizens they serve, in the development and application of design-led approaches to social challenges and to inform policy. It displays a selection of practice-based PCL collaborative design engagement tools that provide a site for argument, debate and exchange between participants in the process of creative engagement. Taking these tools as a starting point, the mini-workshop explores the various definitions of such tools (thing, boundary object, cultural probe, etc.), discussing their role in participatory design research.

Abstract

Objectives
Food processing facilities represent critical infrastructure that have stayed open during much of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding the burden of COVID-19 in this sector is thus important to help reduce the potential for workplace infection in future outbreaks.


Methods
We undertook a workplace survey in the UK food and drink processing sector and collected information on workplace size, characteristics (e.g. temperature, ventilation), and experience with COVID-19 (e.g. numbers of positive cases). For each site, we calculated COVID-19 case rates per month per 1000 workers. We performed an ecological analysis using negative binomial regression to assess the association between COVID-19 rates and workplace and local risk factors.


Results
Respondents from 33 companies including 66 individual sites completed the survey. COVID-19 cases were reported from the start of the pandemic up to June 2021. Respondents represented a range of industry subgroups, including grain milling/storage (n = 16), manufacture of malt (n = 14), manufacture of prepared meals (n = 12), manufacture of beverages (n = 8), distilling (n = 5), manufacture of baked goods (n = 5), and other (n = 6), with a total of 15 563 workers across all sites. Average monthly case rates per 1000 workers ranged from 0.9 in distilling to 6.1 in grain milling/storage. Incidence rate ratios were partially attenuated after adjusting for several local and workplace factors, though risks for one subgroup (grain milling/storage) remained elevated. Certain local and workplace characteristics were related to higher infection rates, such as higher deprivation (5 km only), a lower proportion of remote workers, lower proportion of workers in close proximity, and higher numbers of workers overall.


Conclusions
Our analysis suggests some heterogeneity in the rates of COVID-19 across sectors of the UK food and drink processing industry. Infection rates were associated with deprivation, the proportions of remote workers and workers in close proximity, and the number of workers.