scholarly journals The added value of regenerative architecture and contemporary aesthetic philosophy

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-414
Author(s):  
Andrea Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Architecture Design ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Living Building Challenge ◽  
Regenerative Design ◽  
The Way

Regenerative architecture seeks to impact positively on the environment. It aims to produce buildings that reduce the degenerative consequences of human activity and add positively to the environment. To add value, in dimensions such as beauty, included in the design approaches of regenerative architecture, and in, for example, the Living Building Challenge, where the biophilic and biomimetic are raised as aspirations, however, poses some fundamental questions for the ways of thinking that underlie regenerative architecture and the discipline of architecture. Design tools suggest that the "greater than character" can be determined, measured even, in all categories, but aspirations also call for radical changes to the way we see and understand human lives. Understandings of aesthetics and the primacy of a sensory connection with the environment are little acknowledged questions within the philosophy of regenerative design outside the suggestion of biophilia. In this paper, I examine the foundations of environmental aesthetics: stories, myths, dreams and the importance of the creative imagination in understanding and reevaluating the way we see and understand human lives and our relationship to our built and natural environments.

The Sphere of the Human

2019 ◽  
pp. 267-322
Author(s):  
Helmuth Plessner ◽  
J. M. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Psychological Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Way

“Centric positionality” is a form of organism-environment relation exhibited by animal forms of life. Human life is characterized not only by centric but also by excentric positionality—that is, the ability to take a position beyond the boundary of one’s own body. Excentric positionality is manifest in: the inner, psychological experience of human beings; the outer, physical being of their bodies and behavior; and the shared, intersubjective world that includes other human beings and is the basis of culture. In each of these three worlds, there is a duality symptomatic of excentric positionality. Three laws characterize excentric positionality: natural artificiality, or the natural need of humans for artificial supplements; mediated immediacy, or the way that contact with the world in human activity, experience, and expression is both transcendent and immanent, both putting humans directly in touch with things and keeping them at a distance; and the utopian standpoint, according to which humans can always take a critical or “negative” position regarding the contents of their experience or their life.

scholarly journals Picturesque Farming: The Sound of ‘Happy Britannia’ in Colonial Australia

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Denney
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Great Emphasis ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
The Way

This essay examines the way in which the British landscape tradition influenced perceptions of sound, noise and silence in colonial Australia, focusing on representations of rural soundscape in art and literature. It argues that poets and artists attempted to recreate an image of Australia as a new ‘Happy Britannia’, a noisy society engaged in virtuous agricultural labour. But this image was opposed to the prevailing taste for picturesque landscape, which accorded little value to human activity and placed great emphasis on silent, rural scenery. Accordingly, colonial perceptions of soundscape were ambivalent, as human-produced noise was heard as both a sign of the progress of civilisation and an obstacle to the spread of cultural refinement.

scholarly journals Single cell ecology

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1786) ◽  
pp. 20190076 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Richards ◽  
Ramon Massana ◽  
Stefano Pagliara ◽  
Neil Hall
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Biological Processes ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Biological Entities ◽  
The Way

Cells are the building blocks of life, from single-celled microbes through to multi-cellular organisms. To understand a multitude of biological processes we need to understand how cells behave, how they interact with each other and how they respond to their environment. The use of new methodologies is changing the way we study cells allowing us to study them on minute scales and in unprecedented detail. These same methods are allowing researchers to begin to sample the vast diversity of microbes that dominate natural environments. The aim of this special issue is to bring together research and perspectives on the application of new approaches to understand the biological properties of cells, including how they interact with other biological entities. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Single cell ecology’.

Surprisingly diverged populations ofSaccharomyces cerevisiaein natural environments remote from human activity

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (22) ◽  
pp. 5404-5417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qi-Ming Wang ◽  
Wan-Qiu Liu ◽  
Gianni Liti ◽  
Shi-An Wang ◽  
Feng-Yan Bai
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Natural Environments

Reason, Action, and the Creative Imagination

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Roger W. H. Savage ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
Normative Value ◽  
Practical Field ◽  
The Way

The exemplary value of individual moral and political acts provides a unique vantage point for inquiring into the role of the creative imagination in social life. Drawing on Kant’s concept of productive imagination, I argue that an act’s exemplification of a fitting response to a moral or political problem or crisis is comparable to the way that a work of art expresses the ‘thought’ or ‘idea’ to which it gives voice. The exercise of practical reason, or phronesis, is akin to the way that a work augments the practical field of our experiences in this respect. For, like a work of art, the act produces the rule to be followed by means of the example that it sets. Accordingly, I explain how the injunction issuing from the act can be credited to the way that the singular case summons its rule. The singular character of the injunction issuing from the act thus brings to the fore the relation between reflective judgment and this injunction’s normative value. The conjunction of reason, action, and the creative power of imagination offers a critical point of access for interrogating the normative force of claims rooted in individual acts. By setting reason, action, and imagination in the same conceptual framework, I therefore highlight the creative imagination’s subversive role in countering hegemonic systems and habits of thought through promoting the causes of social and political struggles.

Drawing Some Conclusions From the Work of the World’s First Business Task Force on Climate Change

2008 ◽  
Vol 02 (02) ◽  
pp. 02-03
Author(s):  
Ben Verwaayen
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Task Force ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Way

Executive Perspective Running a big company is not as complicated as you might think. There are only a few things you have to do, but high on the list is the ability to identify significant business risks and to decide how they will be mitigated. No doubt scientists will continue to argue for years to come about the scale and intensity of climate change and about the part in this process that human activity is playing. But one thing is certain, climate change presents a significant and immediate risk, not just to business but to the way we conduct our lives, and to the kind of world that we will leave to our children and our grandchildren.

scholarly journals Which Stakeholders’ Sector Matters in Rural Development? That Is the Problem

Energies ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 454
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kusio ◽  
Mariantonietta Fiore
Keyword(s):  
Rural Development ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Rural People ◽  
Stakeholder Groups ◽  
National Perspective

In the age of COVID, the regaining of economies appears mostly imperative, and rural areas could play a crucial role in this framework. The question of inhabitants’ dispersion and low density, and the exodus of rural people to bigger urban centers have determined an adverse effect on rural development. Rural isolation rises to be a higher order good, delivering a higher degree of security in the pandemic context for those seeking refuge from gatherings of cities. Rural areas provide food, natural environments, and resources that help occupations, development, and wealth trends and preserve cultural heritage. Consequently, rural spaces are vital for several motives and thus it is essential to focus on issue of rural development, especially since lacking rural development does not allow dialoging about development in a regional and/or national perspective. This paper investigates the stakeholders’ impact on rural development, by considering the increasing role of stakeholders as well as the specificity of the diverse objectives pursued by these groups. As there are several stakeholder groups, attention was sweeping, defining them in a sectoral way to corporate, sciences, public administrations, and society. Where there was a need to distinguish among these sectors groups of stakeholders in a more detailed way, such identification took place, for example, in relation to social leaders. The analysis of the results of the questionnaire survey performed in 2020 aimed to accomplish the identified purposes of the paper. The online survey using the CAWI method was conducted in southeastern Poland among people representing all stakeholder groups. The outcomes of the investigation indicate the great prominence of business in the development of rural areas being able to generate added value and influence the increase of entity potential.

scholarly journals Bias Misinformation and the Paradox of Neutrality

10.28945/3277 ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Bednar ◽  
Christine Welch
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Activity Systems ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
Subjective Opinion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Subjective Bias ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

What is normally described as bias? A possible definition comprises attempts to distort or mislead to achieve a certain perspective, i.e. subjective descriptions intended to mislead. If designers were able to exclude bias from informing systems, then this would maximize their effectiveness. This implicit conjecture appears to underpin much of the research in our field. However, in our efforts to support the evolution and design of informing systems, the way we think, communicate and conceptualize our efforts clearly influences our comprehension and consequently our agenda for design. Objectivity (an attempt to be neutral or transparent) is usually regarded as exclusion of bias. However, claims for objectivity do not, by definition, include efforts to inquire into and reflect over subjective values. Attempts to externalize the mindset of the subject do not arise as part of the description. When claims to objectivity are made, this rarely includes any effort to make subjective bias transparent. Instead, objectivity claims may be regarded as a denial of bias. We suggest that bias can be introduced into overt attempts to admit subjectivity. For example, where people are asked to give subjective opinion according to an artificially enforced scale of truth-falsity (bi-valued logic), they may find themselves coerced into statements of opinion that do not truly reflect the views they might have wished to express. People do not naturally respond to their environment with opinions limited to restricted scales; rather, they tend to use multi-valued, or para-consistent logic. This paper examines the impact of bias within attempts to establish communicative practice in human activity systems (informing systems).

scholarly journals Epistemological Aspects of the Organisation of Human Activity in the Transition from Disparate Social Techniques to Societal Technologies

wisdom ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Alexei AVTONOMOV ◽  
Vladislav GRIB
Keyword(s):  
Human Computer Interaction ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Problem Resolution ◽  
Technological Approach ◽  
Social Technologies ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Computer Interaction ◽  
The Way

The expansion and deepening of human-computer interaction in modern conditions have attracted attention to human activity and required its study at a new level. The article is devoted to the examination of the problems of organising human activity based on the knowledge of its key components. Epistemological approaches to thinking and knowing as directions of the development of human activity make it possible to increase the efficiency of the organisation of human activity as a whole and raise questions that can be resolved on the way of further methodology evolution. The further transition from the methodology of research and practices to social technologies that would allow purposefully producing new knowledge, on the basis of which, in turn, it would be possible to improve the quality of the organisation of human activity, seems appropriate and natural. The authors argue that the technological approach to problem resolution is useful and fruitful not only in the sphere of engineering and technical devices but also in the field of social relations.

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