Transformational Change for Achieving Scale: Lessons for a Greener Recovery

Achieving transformational changes that can be then effectively scaled up requires ambition in design, a supportive policy environment, sound project design and implementation, partnerships, and multistakeholder participation. This chapter presents a framework that can be applied at the design stage to plan for change and scaling up and provides relevant lessons based on GEF interventions. Achieving change and scale can be an iterative and a continuous process until impacts are generated at the magnitude and scope of the targeted scale. Successful transformations typically adopt a systems approach and address multiple constraints to attain environmental and other socioeconomic impacts.

Incorporating Affective Computing Into an Interactive System With MakeyMakey

People's motions or behaviors often ensue from these positive or negative emotions. Set off either subconsciously or intentionally, these fragmentary responses also represent people's emotional vacillations at different times, albeit rarely noted or discovered. This system incorporates affective computing into an interactive installation: While a user is performing an operation, the system instantaneously and randomly generates corresponding musical instrument sound effects and special effects. The system is intended to enable users to interact with emotions through the interactive installation to yield a personalized digital artwork as well learning about how emotions affect the causative factors of consciousness and personal behaviors. At the end of the process, this project design renders three questionnaires for users to fill in as a means to enhance the integrity and richness of the system with a survey and to further increase the stability and precision of the system through progressive modifications aligned with user suggestions.

Staying Small and Beautiful: Enhancing Sustainability in the Small Island Developing States

Spread over the ocean regions of the Caribbean, the Pacific and Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the South China Sea, the small island developing states (SIDS) are a distinct group of developing countries often known for their rich biological diversity, oceans, tourism, and fisheries. The pressures on these and other natural resources is most immediate in the islands where the high vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, limited land and water resources, often unsustainable natural resource use, and other particular economic vulnerabilities are disrupting livelihoods. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the SIDS economies and livelihoods. Over the past 25 years the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has supported interventions in SIDS through $578 million in financing, in critical areas such as biodiversity protection, climate resilience, and energy access through renewable energy. But how effective and sustainable have these interventions been? What factors influencing the sustainability of GEF interventions can provide insights for future project design and implementation? This chapter draws on findings from a recent country cluster evaluation on SIDS conducted by the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the GEF. It presents the main environmental challenges in SIDS, the evidence on the relevance and effectiveness of GEF interventions in addressing these challenges, and the main risks to sustainability of outcomes. Important contextual factors that affect sustainability in SIDS include good policies and legal and regulatory frameworks, national ownership of projects, environmental awareness, institutional capacity, and strategic institutional partnerships. Project-related factors including good project design and adaptive project management, scaling-up and replication based on lessons learned, and a good exit strategy are also important for sustainability.

An Enterprising Take on Undergraduate Research in English

This article profiles a University of North Carolina Greensboro undergraduate research digital humanities opportunity. The authors explain how their faculty-student-library team met challenges of generating a digital exhibit while overcoming typical resource constraints. They articulate three sites of applied knowledge the student gained from this research and detail the project design and efforts to call attention to invisible undergraduate research (UR). Such visibility facilitates additional course-based research opportunities and helps institutional stakeholders imagine further enterprising opportunities for UR despite time and material constraints.

Virtual Experimental Project Design in the Digital Signal Processing Course

This paper proposes the design and development of virtual experimental projects in the Digital Signal Processing course, using MATLAB, Proteus, and CCS platforms to develop a library of typical experimental cases for biomedical engineering majors and discusses the design process. Based on these typical cases, this paper explores the secondary design for innovative engineering practice case teaching, which can promote students’ understanding and mastery of digital signal processing theories, algorithms, and technologies in an intuitive, flexible, and efficient way; quickly build new innovative engineering case models and further cultivate students’ engineering application ability as well as innovative thinking.

Ownership and Effectiveness of China’s Aid Projects in Africa

The notion of ‘ownership’ has occupied a central place in measuring the effectiveness of North–South cooperation. How is it represented in South–South cooperation (SSC) and how does it affect the effectiveness of SSC? There is no clear answer in the existing literature. In this article, we describe the representation of ‘ownership’ in SSC and explain how it has affected the process and impact of SSC projects using case studies of three uniformly designed Chinese agricultural aid projects in Mozambique, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Based on long-term participatory observation and in-depth interviews, we find that ‘ownership’ in SSC is represented differently from project design to implementation. Divergence and ambiguity exist among different stakeholders on the operation of ‘ownership’. ‘Co-ownership’ of two partners at the local level contributes to the effectiveness of SSC projects while ‘de-ownership’ and ‘forced ownership’ have a negative impact on the survival and sustainable development of SSC projects.

Examining social class and multilingualism through the Linguistic Landscape

This article presents a methodological proposal for using the Linguistic Landscape (LL) to examine the intersection of multilingualism and social class in urban settings. The article draws from a study that considered how patterns of linguistic diversity in public signage in a mid-sized US city mapped onto socioeconomic levels. The main innovation for LL methodology is the study’s use of census data and geographic information system (GIS) to increase representativeness using two main constructs (social class and linguistic diversity). After presenting the project design, the challenge of creating representative mapping in the LL is considered, with the solutions the research team generated. Finally, we discuss several practical issues specific to doing LL fieldwork in urban contexts: access, safety, and photography.

Architectural Environmental, And Process Flow in Constructing Modern Factories for Manufacturing Eco-Friendly Furniture

Today, a dominant trend in factory construction is to account for the eco-economic aspects of their further operations. It requires sustainable technological solutions, with regard for structural specificities or for production technology used. At the same time, the buildings shall be architecturally attractive and distinct. In the paper, the author considered architectural, technological, structural, ecological, and economic factors for construction of wood-processing and furniture-making facilities. The author analyzed the actual Project Design to build the type of facility in Krekhiv village, Zhovkva district, Lviv region (western Ukraine) as commissioned by a well-known French company (the author have been engaged in the design). The study focused on a wood-processing Woodman company designed for the midtech production of edge glued panels and furniture. According to the design documentation by types of products planned, the Project Design provided for the following production units: unit for wood-sawing and drying; unit for mechanical processing of wood, production of edge glued panels and furniture; unit for mechanical repairs; and an administrative and services unit. The anticipated annual production capacity is: for edge glued panels – 600 m3 a year, furniture production– up to 4,000 pc a year. “Wood-sawing unit”, according to the Project Design, is organized according to the following principles of production technology based on the stages and operations: stockholding and storage of round timber (sawtimber); cutting the sawtimber into the shaped timber and logs; stocking the sawn timber (untrimmed boards) into stockpiles and on separators for further atmospheric and chamber drying. Sawn timber drying is taking place in the “Drying Unit”. It is the process of moisture removal from timber to a certain degree of humidity. The Project Design provided for the atmospheric drying of logs and boards in the furnished stockpiles under the roof, and artificial seasoning in a steam-curing and drying chambers. The artificial seasoning technology for sawn timber and logs is organized with the help of drying chambers and a boiler room with a sawdust bunker. The “Unit for Mechanical Wood Processing, Production of Edged Glued Panels and Furniture” is used for production of the edged glued panels from the sawn timber coming from hardwood (beech, oak). The production process of the edged glued panels includes the following stages: 1) cross-cutting of dry boards; 2) line cutting of board edges for the rough-sawn stock; 3) primary mechanical processing; 4) sorting by quality, color; 5) end-jointing gluing line; 6) log finishing; 7) press-molding of logs into panels; 8) panel surface preparation; 9) size cutting; 10) preservative treatment; 11) quality control; 12) storage and sales. "Administrative and Service Block", according to the Project Design, is an inbuilt part of the Main Building (Unit). It is a two-story insert separated with the fire safety barriers from the manufacturing facilities. It has isolated outside entrances and a technological corridor linking the manufacturing facilities. With account for production process requirements, fire safety, and sanitary standards, the Unit is divided into several personal services rooms for the staff and administrative rooms.

Approach to a Project Framework in the Environment of Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Case Study of a Training Proposal to a Group of Students in a Higher Education Institution

The purpose of this research was to plan an approach to a project framework that integrated a model for sustainability and CSR, with the process groups of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) standard, in its application to the training of a group of students in Project Design, Management, and Evaluation. The integration was justified by the scarce explicit references to sustainability and CSR found in traditional project management guidelines, norms, and standards. The new framework was used to structure a Sustainability Management Plan, which made it possible to incorporate sustainability criteria throughout the life cycle of the training project. The training proposal in Project Design, Management, and Evaluation was chosen, among several alternatives, by a multi-criteria selection process (fuzzy AHP) in the context of project scope management. The results reveal a great heterogeneity among the models and the lack of a base of key indicators in sustainability and CSR measurement tools as well as of explicit references to sustainability in project management standards. It is therefore necessary to develop a Sustainability Management Plan that can be introduced in the Project Management Plan and thus influence the strategic and operational guidelines of the Institution.